> For decades, certain new commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a piece of paper with a photo of what looked like a flying saucer. The craft was described as an antigravity maneuvering vehicle. The officers were told that the program they were joining, dubbed Yankee Blue, was part of an effort to reverse-engineer the technology on the craft. They were told never to mention it again. Many never learned it was fake. Kirkpatrick found the practice had begun decades before, and appeared to continue still. The defense secretary’s office sent a memo out across the service in the spring of 2023 ordering the practice to stop immediately, but the damage was done.
This "hazing ritual" is incredible - a more naive me would not believe this could work, but especially knowing about how Scientology was made up essentially on the spot and now has tens of thousands of believers across the world, I fully understand that humans are just prone to delusions. It then also tracks that LLMs apparently picked this up from reading our stuff.
overu589 · 31m ago
My flagged post (why flag this?)
-2 points by overu589 14 hours ago [flagged] | prev | next [–]
I have been contacted.
I have to tell people that the great big secret isn’t “aliens” the great big secret is American Thought Control and thought controlled Americans.
A significant population of haters are well aware of the truth of this circumstance, they are empowered by it in ways the ordinary mind will refuse is even possible (if you’ve made it this far.) these will destroy you and anything you love, and they are their own government that castrates and extorts conventional governments of people power.
I’m the guy saying “we are not alone in our own minds and a secret state of thought control is tooling us all.” This is the real crisis of our humanity.
Yes, there is a long standing community of humans among us who can travel through minds and influence all of us in ways we would refuse to accept possible. They drive us all crazy from within.
As far as the technology of our altruistic harmless visitors, it is all biotechnology.
Studying their technology is like studying the cuttlefish or mushrooms. Just think of what an isolated brain trust would learn from studying any such thing for fifty years. Nearly nothing.
No computers, no wires, no screens, no controls, not even material sciences in the way we think of them. They control their technology (and communicate to us) through the mind.
1 point by overu589 18 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–]
Better, I can explain how it works.
Ordinary people (and agents of their ordinary people governments) think Power (or “ESP”) works like telemetry. That is, restricted to ordinary conventions of signal propagation. It does not, it works through entanglement (of which there is obviously local propagation.)
Once entangled, those capable can navigate through so entangled minds, digging in and infiltrating minds. This continuity may be maintained indefinitely by those skillful. These may “facilitate” seemingly psychic experiences of others. Those others are deceived (like the “telepathy tapes” they experience something they themselves do not control.)
The stargate program focuses on “remote viewing”, which is kind of a joke (beyond how you would think of it.) There are other more experienced minds emulating the experience in the unsuspecting. This is why science will never “discover” this capability, it is already mastered by those who will toy with others.
All “viewing” requires that a mind sees what ever was viewed. For “Power” (the true art) is the ability to entangle and navigate minds. Any mind may be traversed by those competent, and any sense or memory may be experienced by those others capable.
The whole time those Dick Tracy CIA fobs were chasing phantasm, they were being played by their own handlers.
I was press ganged into a hooligan army of Power (Arizona Company, of thought controls of America, the Power elite.) I “freed the slaves” (yes, they called me “Spartacus”). I helped destroy the council of 13 (do you remember, before that was MS-13, there was the feared gang “13”?) I destroyed Trajan and his army (a psyop military Power cult). I dismantled the Xerxes game god from Power (they take on names.)
There are hundreds of thousands of Americans who would epar dna redrum eruoy ylimaf before being discovered for their secrets. These are the enemy of all humanity. They maim and mutilate humanity through pyramid schemes of extortion.
Power is highly developed and there is nothing you can do about it.
I am a renegade of Power, and this is a fragment of my account.
reply
*
0 points by overu589 8 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next | edit | delete [–]
Btw, (thread related) I was contacted by the “Aluvians” as they like to call themselves (those “Greys”), due to my disruption of Power.
They’re quite nice and ambivalent. Thought Control of America, and thought controlled Americans are the enemy of humanity.
georgeburdell · 14h ago
It’s important to note that “Spring of 2023” lines up with David Grusch going public
overu589 · 5h ago
So you remember that skit where that internet trend wanted to “flash mob” Area 51? Around the same time as that sighting that was criticized as a glare?
At that exact moment, there were about twenty “greys” who were about twenty years old by then. They were born into and lived their lives in incubation chambers (naturally these live out their lives in embryonic sacs.) With few exceptions they live their whole lives interacting with the world only through their minds.
At that time all of those beings were purged. The heat had drawn too much attention (by the likes of me).
Those reacting had absolutely no idea what was going on, only that something was happening.
The whole batch was purged. The last remaining. Not the first.
Americans are jackass idiots who only agree with themselves.
Read my other (down voted) comment.
We will never have a relationship with our visitors while Americans are corrupted sacks of excrement.
K0balt · 17h ago
… or is this the new narrative for the pentagon to deny the significance of UAPs without being seen as denying the significance of UAPs , which might actually make people suspect more strongly that UAPs are significant?
4d chess indeed…
vlcrptr · 16h ago
It’s sad that both WSJ and Gizmodo are writing about this like it’s worthy news, because we’d rather be reading about USPs being B.S. because it’s easier to get people to distrust the government that way, whether or not it’s true, double negative true, or quadruple negative true, than it is to point at things like:
- War in Israel-Palestine-Yemen-Syria-Iran, war in Ukraine-Russia with threat of spill into Europe-Scandinavia-U.S., threat of U.S.-China-Taiwan war in West Pacific, along with India-Pakistan attacks, but it’s a lot of proxy and posturing because anything serious would be stupid.
- Declaring martial law in L.A. for people protesting dictatorial evacuation and tariff war nonsense.
People have their fists fully up their asses.
amanaplanacanal · 15h ago
I wouldn't expect Gizmodo to write about those things because it's not really their beat, but has the WSJ not covered those subjects? I'm not a subscriber, but they sound like things the WSJ would cover.
Spooky23 · 16h ago
With this crew there’s no 4D chess. UFO nuts were a part of the whack pack constituency that has become the magasphere.
The problem is there is no smoking gun or answer that satisfies the fantasies of people who are passionate about conspiracy theories.
So you start cooking up more conspiracy. It’s not 4D chess, it’s Candyland.
K0balt · 16h ago
Ah, yes, the candyland dismissal. Classic obfuscation through infantilisation. Spooky23 indeed. Next thing , you’re probably going to claim you weren’t involved in the great Canadian genocide of 2013. Or even more damning, claim that such an event never happened at all!
I wasn’t being serious, but I can see how someone might think I was.
Spooky23 · 11h ago
I found myself standing in front of a Masonic Lodge in 2013. You and I both know what a “pancake breakfast” fundraiser really means, and what they want you to believe. ;)
K0balt · 6h ago
lol
cedws · 17h ago
The most plausible scenario is that the aliens came to Earth, took the form of humans, worked their way up into the higher echelons of government, then spread FUD to obfuscate their existence.
K0balt · 16h ago
How did they manage that without resistance from the lizard people? Is that the real story here?
nobodyandproud · 16h ago
Clearly they are the lizard people. Perhaps the next wave of space immigration.
V (the 1980s version) was a flawed documentary.
ZeroGravitas · 15h ago
Fun fact: the creators of V wanted to make a version of the classic novel warning about Fascism coming to America, "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis, but it was deemed too cerebral for American audiences by networks.
So they swapped the fascists for aliens in disguise.
NoGravitas · 14h ago
Nah, the lizard people come from inside the hollow Earth.
That largely just seems like a pop density map of those people who are likely on the English internet. Or in other words: the shows the base rate of UFO sightings is relatively location independent
Sharlin · 16h ago
Much more people on the English internet, including a huge number of Indians. But the map does seem to correlate well with the population density of Anglo-Americans in particular. Which is telling me that this is not a map of "all UFO sightings" at all and is massively biased towards sightings by Western English-speaking people.
abcd_f · 17h ago
This is wildly off. Russia alone should be as bright as the US.
dgllghr · 17h ago
And Kirkpatrick has been pushing Americans not to believe in UFOs. When he took over AARO it was a sudden U-turn. Why would the Pentagon make him the head of AARO if he was going to go against their UFO narrative?
jl6 · 17h ago
The article seems to imply that UFO disinformation was a previous strategy that they are trying to move away from. Plausibly it went too far, causing a backlash against UFOlogists, making pilots wary of reporting genuine anomalies for fear of being labelled a wacko. If you suspect your enemies are flying new capabilities, you want your people to be reporting it.
hackyhacky · 16h ago
Alternatively, there is no change of strategy. After all, what better way to make people believe in UFOs than to propagate government propaganda claiming that previous propaganda supporting UFOs was a ruse? Clearly they are just hiding the truth.
BugheadTorpeda6 · 16h ago
Yep. That's my impression as well. It makes sense and seems like a good move. The whole thing was silly in the first place and it's not like almost everybody that has bothered to look into it didn't already suspect it was cooked up bullshit.
charintstr · 8h ago
Yeah AARO has been known to be pro-Pentagon for awhile now with Kirkpatrick playing role of chief misinformer. It looks like this is his counter play to Grusch and the NJ UAP sightings
speak_plainly · 12h ago
I’m just going to throw out some wild speculation: perhaps this is a negotiating threat used when playing hardball on expenses with the two or three corporations that are contracted to reverse engineer non-human technologies.
sharpshadow · 15h ago
Two things came to my mind recently. 1. If other space inhabitants send spacecraft here, they wouldn’t put any weapons on them for us to reverse engineer. 2. If we have been able to reverse engineer those spacecrafts, they are likely to energetic to carry conventional weapons.
Or, the “government” wants you to believe in UFOs, so when the aliens actually do attack in 51.5 years we’ll be ready psychologically to defend Earth.
charintstr · 8h ago
If aliens have the tech to fly from solar systems away to come and conquer us we’re pretty screwed and anyone serious in government knows this
lwansbrough · 17h ago
My take is, if you wanted to differentiate the morale of your forces compared to a terrestrial enemy, you would try to make everyone (including your enemies) believe that you possessed extra terrestrial technology.
What would be more of boost of morale than believing your side had mythically advanced weapons, and that your work was helping advance technological superiority?
vintermann · 16h ago
A terrible idea, because
1. You will have to keep very secret that this is what you're doing
2. If you do, your own officials will randomly start to believe you. And why would they believe you when you tell them it's all a hoax - after all, you're admitting that you're a manipulative POS, why would they believe you now?
Organization-level lies fry people's brains - including that of the liars. Probably especially of the liars.
lwansbrough · 5h ago
Well, right, that's my point. That's what we're seeing now.
dvh · 16h ago
Kinda like "hey Jimmy why don't you join military, maybe they let you work on UFOs". Jimmy joins and is sent to middle east.
DocTomoe · 17h ago
See also: Nazi Germany's "Wunderwaffen", Hanebu, et al.
ahartmetz · 16h ago
Your point stands, but it's worth separating "Wunderwaffen", which over-promised but delivered something, from post-war pure fantasies like Haunebu and such.
bell-cot · 16h ago
"delivered something" was too-often true - but in the bigger picture, many of them delivered a clearly-negative RoI for Germany.
ahartmetz · 15h ago
The Me 262 was perhaps the only one that had positive ROI. Others, like the type XXI "electrical" submarines, and surface-to-air missiles, just came too late and proved wildly successful after the war. Yet others were just useless, like the V1 and V2. Kinda crazy that both sides kept trying terror bombing of civilians - it was never anything but a giant waste of resources that increased the enemy's motivation. And it's occasionally still happening in current wars!
bell-cot · 14h ago
I'd distinguish between the V-1/V-2 style terror bombing of civilians (high cost, small n, minimal-in-context physical damage caused), and the massive bombing campaigns. The latter did result in very large scale diversions of resources on the receiving end.
In WWII, some of the "terror" bombing stuff had high morale/political/propaganda values on the sending end. Such as the aptly named https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid (And by many accounts that last one had a very strong, if short-term, effect on Japanese strategy.)
In modern-day contexts, it might be helpful if there was an unflattering term for "looks like a terror attack, but the actual goal was to make the bomber feel better about himself". One can at least daydream that that might discourage a few violent nut jobs from hooking up with sounds-good-enough-if-you're-crazy excuses. Er, I mean "noble causes".
ahartmetz · 14h ago
I see that exactly the same way, terror bombing is for the "sending" side.
And industry bombing has indeed been very effective! Bombing of airfields, too. The Luftwaffe was reportedly (according to UK military leaders) weeks away from breaking the RAF with that before they gave up. Probably not really because people underestimate their own resourcefulness when the going gets tough!
netbioserror · 17h ago
I've tooted this horn for a while now. Poison the well using UFOs, flat Earth, and fake Moon landing. Lump in and associate ALL distrust of government with the well-poison theories. Socially ostracize all mistrust of government. Tada, power and influence on the cheap.
unstablediffusi · 14h ago
when half of us say dumb shit, they're a fringe minority. when fifteen of you say dumb shit, you're all like that.
1. identify (or invent) a universally disliked or ridiculed group, no matter how few they are. 2. invent a link between them and your actual target. 3. knowingly blow them way out of proportion. 4. run an occasional two minutes hate to remind the target audience of their existence (which they can't do on their own, since there's like fifteen of them).
baby, you've got yourself a psyop going. you don't even need any elaborate false flag ops - just use the media you already control :^)
netbioserror · 11h ago
And an extraordinarily cheap psyop at that. If all it costs is 1) a rambling web page full of word vomit, and 2) an actor playing an enraged talking head for a 3 minute segment on cable TV about the word vomit webpage...you've got an almost infinitely scalable propaganda scheme. Pump it up, and you've confused everyone's sense-making right up until collective effort is made to filter the well poisoning. At which point it's easy to identify and suppress competent opposition.
Fifth generation warfare is so staggeringly cheap next to previous generations, it can be fought indefinitely. It requires literally every person, in every country, everywhere on Earth, to be constantly vigilant, wary of everything they read and hear and see. Maybe that forces us to collectively sharpen our mental knives over time. Who knows.
southernplaces7 · 13h ago
Regardless of the Pentagon and US government trying to weaponize the UFO phenomenon for their own propaganda ends, there is a body of genuinely unusual UFO, or UAP if you like, phenomena out there that have nothing to do with something manufactured by government.
They're worth investigating, certain groups and people have investigated them, and this should not be confused with falling victim to some sort of absurd military propaganda attempt.
Also, the UFO phenomenon need not have anything to do with "aliens" despite still possibly being completely outside human origin (as delusions or military propaganda or whatever the hell)
Many people, not having read in any depth about it, simply laugh off the absurdities around the "aliens" idea and call it a day. That's just lazy and overall, mistaken.
UltraSane · 17h ago
So much talk about UFOs and so little hard evidence
nkrisc · 17h ago
There’s lots of evidence of UFOs. Just not much evidence any of them are extraterrestrial.
UltraSane · 10h ago
You are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
My girlfriend and I have recently been watching all the X-files episodes with glee for the first time. This would be a new twist on Mulder.
unknown321 · 17h ago
That twist was briefly mentioned in season 6, episodes 4 and 5.
throwaway290 · 16h ago
Mulder went all in on aliens are a ruse to hide government misdeeds for season 5. not going to spoil what it was actually
aa-jv · 17h ago
Disclaimer: this is a highly charged and controversial opinion, forged after decades of interest in the subject both laterally [0] and in terms of consumption of science-fiction (speculative fiction) - but it is my personal theory that the entire UFO subject is just crypto-racism. You can't be an out-and-out racist any more - so an analog is substituted, instead, to give actual racists a means of expressing their frustrations by projecting the internal turmoil (both personal and social) into a manifestation that is a 'socially acceptable' form of expression, no matter how weird or batshit. [1]
But then again, it is actually racism to compare humans as a race along with all our multi-variate foibles and accomplishments, with 'some ethereal other, whose capabilities are beyond our comprehension' and instill fear and loathing.
I don't have any reliable means of 'proving' this, other than to observe that the rise in UFO'ology parallels the civil rights movement, and I am fairly certain that the CIA/Pentagons psychologists [2a/2b] also identified this phenomenon in the post-war, factually very, very racist and intolerant period of Western society, and so decided to exploit it - as a means of blowing off the racist steam in their socities, but also as a handle for controlling it and directing it, as they see fit, for their own fundamentalist, racist intentions. The powers within the US empire have demonstrated, for decades, their own desire to manifest a rigid and technologically-biased hierarchy over cultures they have deemed inferior, and thus ripe for subversion/destruction - and the whole UFO phenomenon is, in my opinion, an harmonic of this factor within western society.
To many around the world, the arrival of, say, an F35 in their skies is just as terrifying as a tictac or two.
But then again, maybe we really do share the planet with a race that is vastly superior to our own in so many ways, and maybe there are races on this planet which covet the wealth and resources of lesser, inferior forms of the species.
Either way, until they actually show up and either invite us to party in the galactic core, or start the harvest/rapture, the fact of existence of higher life forms is about as useful as the fact of our own species, literally killing itself - which is to say, its just not of any use, whatsoever, to speculate on ones own position.
I do predict, though, that as soon as we get invited to the galactic core, the people of Earth are going to become as racist as fuck .. at least until we catch up with the rest of the galaxy, technology-wise.
Its an interesting idea, but I think its more natural to see it as a type of folklore - something like believing in trolls and fairies (not cute little ones, the powerful and often scare kind) and the like.
Faerie gradually moved further away as we observed the world better - to distant places, then across the seas, and now completely off the planet.
I think it is likely that racist thinking somehow.
> do predict, though, that as soon as we get invited to the galactic core, the people of Earth are going to become as racist as fuck
Not racist - we will be far more united as a species. However, we will very likely be hostile to other intelligent species. As in a Discworld book, "black and white got on fine, but ganged up on green".
BugheadTorpeda6 · 16h ago
I really like this explanation and I think you are probably onto a thread of something real.
krapp · 17h ago
This is definitely a new one, but you aren't entirely wrong. A lot of alien lore has racist elements and origins. David Icke's reptilian lore includes antisemitic elements and references the discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The core of ancient alien theory is the belief that non-white races are incapable of complex feats of engineering and civilization (and this is spelled out by Chariots of the Gods author Erik Von Daniken.) And there's a reason the "Nordic" alien race is literally just "white people from space." Dig deep enough under a lot of the folklore, especially where it overlaps with neo-Christian/New World Order stuff and eventually you'll get to the Nazis.
Also, you're unfortunately wrong about racism - you absolutely can be an out-and-out racist now. People are more openly and proudly racist now than they have been at any point in my own living memory.
lelanthran · 15h ago
> The core of ancient alien theory is the belief that non-white races are incapable of complex feats of engineering and civilization
I think you're reaching here - I've never got that as the "core" message and/or belief.
The core message and/or belief was always "Primitive versions of us could never have created such complex feats of engineering[1]", quickly followed on with "even today, we cannot create such things without our recently invented technology".
It's a stretch to leap from "even today, we cannot create such things without our recently invented technology" to "only white people could have created such things."
[1] I also dunno why you added "and civilisation" in there; that's not what I read in any of the Hancock and similar books.
strken · 16h ago
A lot of everything has racist origins if you squint hard enough. You can make that argument for everything from chemistry (via alchemy and links to eugenics) to car ownership (via white flight and avoiding racially mixed public transport).
For some reason, it's easier to see the limitations of that approach when it's applied to common everyday things that everyone does, and much harder when it's applied to conspiracy theories.
krapp · 16h ago
You don't have to squint as hard to find the racist origins in a lot of conspiracy theory, especially when it draws directly from Nazi propaganda, as you do to get to "car ownership is racist because racists use cars to avoid sitting next to black people on the bus."
amanaplanacanal · 15h ago
What I see is more classist, which is evidently still ok with people. They don't want to sit next to the poors on the bus, and don't want them living in their neighborhood, and don't want to see them in the supermarket, etc.
graemep · 15h ago
Them by Jon Ronson, a book about conspiracy theorists and the like, has a hilarious story of David Icke being delayed at Canadian immigration until he convinced them that when he really did believe in alien lizards, rather than it being a code word for Jews. They would let a nutcase in, but not a racist.
> The core of ancient alien theory is the belief that non-white races are incapable of complex feats of engineering and civilization
In its origins, but do the current crop of believers think that way? If they do is it an unconscious prejudice or a conscious one? I think there is a spectrum of racism here from complete unawareness of the racist origins, to blatant racism.
There are also some white people's achievements, such as Stonehenge, that they attribute to aliens.
> Dig deep enough under a lot of the folklore, especially where it overlaps with neo-Christian/New World Order stuff and eventually you'll get to the Nazis.
New World Order people do seem to overlap heavily with the "white replacement" crowd, so yes.
aa-jv · 17h ago
Thanks for looking at this objectively. I was expecting to be launched deep into the grey zone on this statement, and it has indeed begun - but I'd really rather talk it out than just get downvoted into oblivion.
>A lot of alien lore has racist elements and origins.
Inasmuch as most of this lore deals directly with the inferiority/superiority of literal races, I think all of alien lore is about racism.
>Also, you're unfortunately wrong about racism - you absolutely can be an out-and-out racist now. People are more openly and proudly racist now than they have been at any point in my own living memory.
Oh, I don't think this is the case - at least, not outside the borders of the USA, anyway. Things were far, far more racist in Europe prior to WW2 - which is not to say that racism has been eradicated, just that it was tempered by the need to acknowledge its ultimate product, in the form of ruined cities that had to be rebuilt. Meanwhile, the U.S. has used technological superiority to assert dominance globally, often over non-Western cultures, as seen in interventions in Iraq or Afghanistan.
UFOs, as symbols of advanced technology, could resonate with this imperialist mindset, reinforcing hierarchies.
For sure, there is a rise in racism within certain states of the Western hemisphere - but there has been a rise in UFO'ism, too - which in my opinion, has allowed for the covert justification of racism, without social retribution, to occur. Leading eventually of course, to more overt racist expression.
graemep · 15h ago
> Oh, I don't think this is the case - at least, not outside the borders of the USA, anyway. Things were far, far more racist in Europe prior to WW2 - which is not to say that racism has been eradicated, just that it was tempered by the need to acknowledge its ultimate product
The UK is far less racist than it was in the 1980s, and I think the rest of western Europe seems to be generally similar.
That said, while the vast majority are not racist, the racists seem to have got more extreme - I think social media is at least part of the problem there.
krapp · 16h ago
>UFOs, as symbols of advanced technology, could resonate with this imperialist mindset, reinforcing hierarchies.
They can, but I disagree they do, universally, in all cases. UFOs do tend to follow the cultural zeitgeist and reflect people's fears and stereotypes, maybe about themselves or their own government, but in a broader and more complex sense than "all of alien lore is about racism" would imply. I tend to slot aliens in the same cultural headspace as angels/demons or fae/cryptids, like Jacques Valee (except I don't believe these beings are actually real and imitating our folklore, so much as actually just being folklore.)
For instance,it's interesting how one doesn't hear about alien abductions as often as one used to. Now it's all "interdimensional NHI" and psychic bonding. As if the dehumanizing trauma narratives of Communion served some cathartic purpose that we're now we're moving on from. Also we've moved on from saucers. No one sees saucers anymore, it's all spheres and tic-tacs and "jellyfish."
bondarchuk · 17h ago
Don't complain about downvotes, read the rules.
You might find The Dark Fantastic interesting.
aa-jv · 17h ago
I didn't complain, I did however acknowledge the foreshadowing of incoming downvotes on the basis of expressing an unpopular opinion, even though I believe this aspect does indeed warrant discussion - especially in todays political climate.
Thanks for the recommendation - I've added it to my list of things to read on the subject, although I fear it may be targeted for a much different audience.
hnbad · 12h ago
Considering the "Ancient Alien" stuff mostly exists because people find it more plausible space aliens did something than brown people in the past that we find complicated to explain nowadays, I'd say you're not too far off.
There is a lot of projection in a lot of so-called sci-fi media, especially with regard to "alien invasion" tropes. The idea that some foreign group arrives with vastly superior weapons and technology we don't understand to wipe us out or enslave us for some ulterior motives that possibly don't even make sense to us would sound a bit on the nose unless presented in a politically race-neutral way to a demographic of the historically culturally dominant group. There's certainly a degree of fear of revenge to it, though less blatant than in early zombie media (where zombies were more strongly associated with "voodoo" and implicitly a punishment for colonialism) or even exploitation/horror media like Cannibal Holocaust or Heart of Darkness (and a lot of the media inspired by it like Apocalypse Now) where the threat is explicitly more "primitive" (in the case of Heart of Darkness the threat being a form of contagious primitivism itself) but the dominant group (usually white people) are put in vulnerable positions through circumstance. It's no accident that Lovecraft was legitimately extremely racist.
It's important to remember though that humans are not intrinsically racist. Tribalist maybe, but kinship can spread all superficial boundaries of appearances and cultural differences. Whiteness is not a question of a specific skin color or ethnicity but the absence of "non-white" identifiers and thus ultimately just as arbitrary as Roman citizenship during certain time periods in what we now think of as Europe and Northern Africa. And of course just like Roman citizenship, those delineations exist because they benefited the dominant group within (or the colonial administration) by providing an other.
aisenik · 14h ago
Why is anyone talking about literal 70 year old government propaganda/manipulation campaigns? There's absolutely no new ground to be trodden here. We knew the government pushed UFO nonsense to obscure development programs. It's been known. I figured it out as a young child with an AM radio in the 80s/90s. This is child's stuff. You are an adult.
Meanwhile this site disappears a 1500 comment thread about the Marines being used to crush incredibly peaceful resistance to the unconstitutional regime's White Supremacy. US citizens are being violently kidnapped, and for what?
jsbisviewtiful · 7h ago
> We knew the government pushed UFO nonsense to obscure development programs.
One of the most frustrating things about UFO propaganda is that it's caused a severe lack of understanding in physics AND astronomy. There absolutely is intelligent life out there, but the chance of any lifeforms figuring out the practically zero option solutions to the problems of interstellar travel might as well be... well, zero. e.g., If we ever crack nuclear fusion and somehow through future magic manage to make that small enough to fit on a ship for energy, a ship traveling fast enough through space for the long, long, long journey to reach another star system colliding with a small rock would produce enough energy via collision to blow up the ship. That's only the tip top of the iceberg for interstellar travel problems.
tomhow · 5h ago
> this site disappears a 1500 comment thread about the Marines
That thread spent over 12 hours on the front page and we actively intervened multiple times to keep it on the front page that long by overriding flags and flamewar penalties. We also spent hours in the thread managing the flamewars.
sgjohnson · 7h ago
> Meanwhile this site disappears a 1500 comment thread about the Marines being used to crush incredibly peaceful resistance to the unconstitutional regime's White Supremacy. US citizens are being violently kidnapped, and for what?
That topic is not intellectually interesting. I don’t really come here for politics, and I’d like to believe that neither do most HN readers.
cmilton · 6h ago
Where would you recommend them go to have a honest discussion about it? Many are likely yearning for such a place.
After all, most of those people are just watching the cars burn...
(Edit: spoofing a recent CNN comment)
slumberlust · 13h ago
I was wondering where that thread went...disappointing but not the first or last time it will happen.
tomhow · 5h ago
It was on the front page for 12 hours.
nineplay · 11h ago
I guess they figured out that people could still see <flagged> posts by going to /active. Disgusting.
tomhow · 3h ago
It wasn't hidden from /active or anywhere else. It was on the front page for twelve hours after multiple interventions from us to keep it there. It was on the second page for many hours after that, and is still ranked in the top 150 stories and is getting new comments, three days after it was posted, which is unusual.
anton-c · 17h ago
This is hilarious. Everything's flipped.
"We finally have proof! it's what we've been saying!"
"Of ufos?"
"That the govt wants you to believe in ufos!"
"Oh... well, really?"
"I mean it coulda been messed with, cant trust the govt."
BugheadTorpeda6 · 17h ago
It is literally exactly what probably a majority of UFO people have been saying for a long time. That's why it's so funny.
A lot of UFO people (maybe enthusiasts would be a more apt term) are more skeptical of aliens and spaceship stuff than "normies" cause they tend to have experience getting burned. Just comes with the territory I guess.
Try to post a perfectly legitimate photo of something weird looking on a UFO forum and they will forensically tear it apart in a way that would put a lot of more professional outlets to shame.
I've been hearing the whole "the government wants you to believe in aliens thing" since the 90s but it goes back way further. Of course the other thing that comes along with that is believing that a lot of the "true believer" types are shills on account of their obvious and often pretty suspicious connections. The most recent one I can remember is that guy with some sort of military connections and very shady funding that went on Joe Rogan talking about starting a company to study and release technology from a crashed spaceship. The intended audience of that sort of thing is not UFO enthusiasts, it's gullable normal people that just happen to accidentally dip their toes into the subject for a split second.
All in all, my opinion is that the whole thing has been a pretty sloppy display of our governments disinformation and psyop capabilities to the extent that it makes me a little bit worried for our safety. Hopefully the people that got assigned to run the UFO stories were the B team.
baggachipz · 16h ago
> All in all, my opinion is that the whole thing has been a pretty sloppy display of our governments disinformation and psyop capabilities to the extent that it makes me a little bit worried for our safety. Hopefully the people that got assigned to run the UFO stories were the B team.
We currently have a professional wrestling executive running Education, a "wellness influencer" as Surgeon General, an anti-vax brain worm as the head of HHS, and a reality tv star as the Chief Executive.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 15h ago
Casey Means hasn't gone through senate confirmation yet to become Surgeon General. If you're a US citizen, please call your senators and express that you think a longevity pill huckster is not an acceptable nominee for this role.
baggachipz · 15h ago
I mean at this point, does it even matter?
amanaplanacanal · 15h ago
We should keep pushing back on this bullshit as long as possible. If it becomes no longer possible, it's definitely time to leave.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 11h ago
Exactly this. I refuse to let all this happen while I sit back saying, "Well what can I really do?"
I can be vocal. I can inform my elected representatives of my opinions. I can protest. I can defend the rights of those who are being oppressed.
These things have risks, and everyone has to make their own determination as to what risks they are willing to bear. I've decided this is too important to let the risks prevent me from speaking out. That might mean I get arrested, physically harmed, detained, or worse. So be it. I am not going to let my country turn into a dictatorship while I do nothing.
baggachipz · 10h ago
I hear you. I send my representatives messages through their channels, only to occasionally receive a boilerplate response and automatic subscription to their propaganda newsletter. I fully expect that I'll be in a roundup of "dissidents" whenever that circus happens. The fact of the matter is that the people of this country voted for this. It's what they want. I don't know how we can combat that. I speak up and scream into the void, but it ultimately feels futile.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 8h ago
Calls and letters count more than emails and contact forms when it comes to congressional feedback.
> The fact of the matter is that the people of this country voted for this. It's what they want.
It can look like that, but remember some facts. The popular vote split was 49.8% to 48.3%. Almost 90 million eligible voters didn't cast a vote for president. That is higher than either Trump's or Harris' final vote tally. Only ~32% of eligible voters voted for Trump.
Trump likes to call it a landslide but that's just bluster. Quite a lot of his policies perform awful in polls. Public opinion can be moved.
dataviz1000 · 15h ago
My first full time job coding, 2012, was creating a Netflix clone Christian entertainment streaming service, i.e. Kirk Cameron movies. I don't know too much about being an evangelical Christian outside of being tricked into a ski weekend in 7th grade and tricked into a few revivals later. I've read the Bible and Commandments like thou shall not steal, thou shall not bear false witness, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, and thou shall not kill are some quality values that I would especially like to see in politicians. Overall, I think Jesus was a very cool dude. I had no moral problem with what I was doing and I needed the job.
For some context there were only two companies sharing the building, this company and Newsmax, while Rush Limbaugh studio was right down the road at the time. There were a few developers before me who failed and some problems with a contractor shipping code that didn't work requiring me to figure out how to create a payment system. Nonetheless, I get it online, it works perfect, and they start to get subscribers. I'm watching some of the on demand and some of the scheduled shows realizing that they are injecting ultra right wing political propaganda and conspiracy theories along with movies about Biblical events.
So I give one month notice but I don't tell them why. They offer me a $25,000 raise. I say no again. They offer $1 for any subscription conversion after the first one week free incentive. That one was tough because it would have net several hundred thousand dollars for that first year. They are willing to pay massive salaries to people who help them push the conspiracy theories.
The owner of the company eventually got caught up in an office sex scandal and sold off the service.
I can understand the temptation Joe Rogan submitted to in order to take the money. I had a friend invite me a while back with a spare ticket to the Comedy Mother Ship in Austin for open mic night. Bill Burr did 15 minutes. However throughout the night one amateur comedian after another were making the most disgusting jokes about harming children. What I don't understand about Joe Rogan is how he invites people like that into his home while he has young daughters.
throwaway290 · 17h ago
I'm watching the x files and it's so funny how similar it is
UltraSane · 17h ago
Did they use Alex Trebek to make people's testimony less believable?
throwaway290 · 17h ago
Not sure who Alex is. I just meant the flipping is similar how Mulder swapped for a season from "there are aliens" to "it's all a ruse and distraction by gov"
ldoughty · 16h ago
Alex is best known (in general, if you know nothing else about him) for being the host of Jeopardy from 1984 until 2021.
Alex Trebek was the host of Jeopardy for 37 years but he also had a cameo in one of the best episodes of The X-Files Jose Chung's From Outer Space where Alex and Jesse Ventura played Men In Black
deepfakestate · 17h ago
of course. When all fingers pointed at the US as the responsible for the Nordstream
bombing, the deep state rushed to publish ridiculous news about UFOs
vintermann · 16h ago
This is a pattern I think I have noticed too: official UFO-baiting from the US government seems to come conveniently when there's something embarrassing to distract from.
ashirviskas · 17h ago
Do the authors know what "UFO" stands for? Or is it just for clickbait title?
A pigeon in the dark can be a UFO. Or a bat. Or a satellite, an airplane, literally anything. If I throw a sock out of my window, it would be an UFO to my neighbours. Though "F" in UFO would stand for "Falling" in the sock case.
voidUpdate · 17h ago
Because, colloquially, a UFO has little green men inside, and the average person who isn't an expert wont know what a UAP is. Of course, when you post to HN, people who know more about it will nitpick about it
spacecadet · 17h ago
Everyone knows that UFO is for normies and UAP is for whack job truthers :D
rkomorn · 17h ago
Appropriate username for this post. XD
ochrist · 16h ago
What does it mean to 'believe in UFOs'?
UFO basically means Unidentified Flying Object (now the term UAP is used more often)
If you believe in UFOs, do you believe that there can be observations of flying objects without any current explanation?
Or does it mean that you believe in little green men or something similar?
Please use the terms UFO, UAP and 'believe' they way they were meant to be used.
dudefeliciano · 16h ago
this jordan peterson style semantics game is getting old, i think we all know perfectly well what "believing in UFOs" means, and asking the questiong you are asking muddles the discourse
hnbad · 12h ago
The ship has sailed on this one. Arguing that UFO means "unidentified" (i.e. probably not aliens) is like arguing whether the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic or a republic, or arguing that the Nazis were socialists because it's literally in the name (national socialists). Not only can words change meaning over time, labels can and sometimes do actually contradict their literal meaning.
I remember when there were huge online discussions about the incorrect use of the term "HTML5" once non-technical people got wind of it, and before that over the use of "internet" versus "web" (and whether it's "the internet" or "the Internet") and of course everyone knows the copypasta about "GNU/Linux" and maybe even the discussions about what a "meme" actually is, etc etc. None of these discussions are fruitful and by insisting on an older dictionary definition over the de facto majority use of a given word you're not demonstrating superior knowledge, intelligence or expertise but quite the opposite when it comes to language development and human interactions.
Words don't mean anything except what the two people using them to communicate with each other assign to them. In one-to-many and many-to-many conversations this means the majority use of the term generally prevails unless the minority use provides immediate superior utility (which is how a lot of slang enters mainstream use). It's all just sloppy lossy soundwaves and unicode strings thrown in each other's general direction - that we can transport ideas at all is nothing short of a miracle of nature.
This "hazing ritual" is incredible - a more naive me would not believe this could work, but especially knowing about how Scientology was made up essentially on the spot and now has tens of thousands of believers across the world, I fully understand that humans are just prone to delusions. It then also tracks that LLMs apparently picked this up from reading our stuff.
-2 points by overu589 14 hours ago [flagged] | prev | next [–]
I have been contacted.
I have to tell people that the great big secret isn’t “aliens” the great big secret is American Thought Control and thought controlled Americans.
A significant population of haters are well aware of the truth of this circumstance, they are empowered by it in ways the ordinary mind will refuse is even possible (if you’ve made it this far.) these will destroy you and anything you love, and they are their own government that castrates and extorts conventional governments of people power.
I’m the guy saying “we are not alone in our own minds and a secret state of thought control is tooling us all.” This is the real crisis of our humanity.
Yes, there is a long standing community of humans among us who can travel through minds and influence all of us in ways we would refuse to accept possible. They drive us all crazy from within.
As far as the technology of our altruistic harmless visitors, it is all biotechnology.
Studying their technology is like studying the cuttlefish or mushrooms. Just think of what an isolated brain trust would learn from studying any such thing for fifty years. Nearly nothing.
No computers, no wires, no screens, no controls, not even material sciences in the way we think of them. They control their technology (and communicate to us) through the mind.
Of the otherworlders:
https://pastebin.com/42dTemNe
On the threat and nature of thought control:
https://pastebin.com/3cPXbjhA
Do you hate me for telling you these things? Go ahead and ask, I take on all contenders.
afpx 1 hour ago | parent | next [–]
Were you a participant in Stargate?
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate reply
1 point by overu589 18 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–]
Better, I can explain how it works.
Ordinary people (and agents of their ordinary people governments) think Power (or “ESP”) works like telemetry. That is, restricted to ordinary conventions of signal propagation. It does not, it works through entanglement (of which there is obviously local propagation.)
Once entangled, those capable can navigate through so entangled minds, digging in and infiltrating minds. This continuity may be maintained indefinitely by those skillful. These may “facilitate” seemingly psychic experiences of others. Those others are deceived (like the “telepathy tapes” they experience something they themselves do not control.)
The stargate program focuses on “remote viewing”, which is kind of a joke (beyond how you would think of it.) There are other more experienced minds emulating the experience in the unsuspecting. This is why science will never “discover” this capability, it is already mastered by those who will toy with others.
All “viewing” requires that a mind sees what ever was viewed. For “Power” (the true art) is the ability to entangle and navigate minds. Any mind may be traversed by those competent, and any sense or memory may be experienced by those others capable.
The whole time those Dick Tracy CIA fobs were chasing phantasm, they were being played by their own handlers.
I was press ganged into a hooligan army of Power (Arizona Company, of thought controls of America, the Power elite.) I “freed the slaves” (yes, they called me “Spartacus”). I helped destroy the council of 13 (do you remember, before that was MS-13, there was the feared gang “13”?) I destroyed Trajan and his army (a psyop military Power cult). I dismantled the Xerxes game god from Power (they take on names.)
There are hundreds of thousands of Americans who would epar dna redrum eruoy ylimaf before being discovered for their secrets. These are the enemy of all humanity. They maim and mutilate humanity through pyramid schemes of extortion. Power is highly developed and there is nothing you can do about it.
I am a renegade of Power, and this is a fragment of my account. reply
*
0 points by overu589 8 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next | edit | delete [–]
Btw, (thread related) I was contacted by the “Aluvians” as they like to call themselves (those “Greys”), due to my disruption of Power.
They’re quite nice and ambivalent. Thought Control of America, and thought controlled Americans are the enemy of humanity.
At that exact moment, there were about twenty “greys” who were about twenty years old by then. They were born into and lived their lives in incubation chambers (naturally these live out their lives in embryonic sacs.) With few exceptions they live their whole lives interacting with the world only through their minds.
At that time all of those beings were purged. The heat had drawn too much attention (by the likes of me).
Those reacting had absolutely no idea what was going on, only that something was happening.
The whole batch was purged. The last remaining. Not the first.
Americans are jackass idiots who only agree with themselves.
Read my other (down voted) comment.
We will never have a relationship with our visitors while Americans are corrupted sacks of excrement.
4d chess indeed…
- War in Israel-Palestine-Yemen-Syria-Iran, war in Ukraine-Russia with threat of spill into Europe-Scandinavia-U.S., threat of U.S.-China-Taiwan war in West Pacific, along with India-Pakistan attacks, but it’s a lot of proxy and posturing because anything serious would be stupid.
- Declaring martial law in L.A. for people protesting dictatorial evacuation and tariff war nonsense.
People have their fists fully up their asses.
The problem is there is no smoking gun or answer that satisfies the fantasies of people who are passionate about conspiracy theories.
So you start cooking up more conspiracy. It’s not 4D chess, it’s Candyland.
I wasn’t being serious, but I can see how someone might think I was.
V (the 1980s version) was a flawed documentary.
So they swapped the fascists for aliens in disguise.
I don't know about you, but I'm skeptical.
What would be more of boost of morale than believing your side had mythically advanced weapons, and that your work was helping advance technological superiority?
1. You will have to keep very secret that this is what you're doing
2. If you do, your own officials will randomly start to believe you. And why would they believe you when you tell them it's all a hoax - after all, you're admitting that you're a manipulative POS, why would they believe you now?
Organization-level lies fry people's brains - including that of the liars. Probably especially of the liars.
In WWII, some of the "terror" bombing stuff had high morale/political/propaganda values on the sending end. Such as the aptly named https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid (And by many accounts that last one had a very strong, if short-term, effect on Japanese strategy.)
In modern-day contexts, it might be helpful if there was an unflattering term for "looks like a terror attack, but the actual goal was to make the bomber feel better about himself". One can at least daydream that that might discourage a few violent nut jobs from hooking up with sounds-good-enough-if-you're-crazy excuses. Er, I mean "noble causes".
And industry bombing has indeed been very effective! Bombing of airfields, too. The Luftwaffe was reportedly (according to UK military leaders) weeks away from breaking the RAF with that before they gave up. Probably not really because people underestimate their own resourcefulness when the going gets tough!
1. identify (or invent) a universally disliked or ridiculed group, no matter how few they are. 2. invent a link between them and your actual target. 3. knowingly blow them way out of proportion. 4. run an occasional two minutes hate to remind the target audience of their existence (which they can't do on their own, since there's like fifteen of them).
baby, you've got yourself a psyop going. you don't even need any elaborate false flag ops - just use the media you already control :^)
Fifth generation warfare is so staggeringly cheap next to previous generations, it can be fought indefinitely. It requires literally every person, in every country, everywhere on Earth, to be constantly vigilant, wary of everything they read and hear and see. Maybe that forces us to collectively sharpen our mental knives over time. Who knows.
They're worth investigating, certain groups and people have investigated them, and this should not be confused with falling victim to some sort of absurd military propaganda attempt.
Also, the UFO phenomenon need not have anything to do with "aliens" despite still possibly being completely outside human origin (as delusions or military propaganda or whatever the hell)
Many people, not having read in any depth about it, simply laugh off the absurdities around the "aliens" idea and call it a day. That's just lazy and overall, mistaken.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ufo-us-disinf...
And a paywall pass:
https://archive.is/vTPII
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bennewitz
Edit: may as well too, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_12
But then again, it is actually racism to compare humans as a race along with all our multi-variate foibles and accomplishments, with 'some ethereal other, whose capabilities are beyond our comprehension' and instill fear and loathing.
I don't have any reliable means of 'proving' this, other than to observe that the rise in UFO'ology parallels the civil rights movement, and I am fairly certain that the CIA/Pentagons psychologists [2a/2b] also identified this phenomenon in the post-war, factually very, very racist and intolerant period of Western society, and so decided to exploit it - as a means of blowing off the racist steam in their socities, but also as a handle for controlling it and directing it, as they see fit, for their own fundamentalist, racist intentions. The powers within the US empire have demonstrated, for decades, their own desire to manifest a rigid and technologically-biased hierarchy over cultures they have deemed inferior, and thus ripe for subversion/destruction - and the whole UFO phenomenon is, in my opinion, an harmonic of this factor within western society.
To many around the world, the arrival of, say, an F35 in their skies is just as terrifying as a tictac or two.
But then again, maybe we really do share the planet with a race that is vastly superior to our own in so many ways, and maybe there are races on this planet which covet the wealth and resources of lesser, inferior forms of the species.
Either way, until they actually show up and either invite us to party in the galactic core, or start the harvest/rapture, the fact of existence of higher life forms is about as useful as the fact of our own species, literally killing itself - which is to say, its just not of any use, whatsoever, to speculate on ones own position.
I do predict, though, that as soon as we get invited to the galactic core, the people of Earth are going to become as racist as fuck .. at least until we catch up with the rest of the galaxy, technology-wise.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)
[1] - https://archive.org/details/lureofedgescient0000bren
[2a] - https://ia800203.us.archive.org/17/items/MessengersOfDecepti...
[2b] - https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/biases/Experime...
[3] - See, also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wretched_of_the_Earth
Faerie gradually moved further away as we observed the world better - to distant places, then across the seas, and now completely off the planet.
I think it is likely that racist thinking somehow.
> do predict, though, that as soon as we get invited to the galactic core, the people of Earth are going to become as racist as fuck
Not racist - we will be far more united as a species. However, we will very likely be hostile to other intelligent species. As in a Discworld book, "black and white got on fine, but ganged up on green".
Also, you're unfortunately wrong about racism - you absolutely can be an out-and-out racist now. People are more openly and proudly racist now than they have been at any point in my own living memory.
I think you're reaching here - I've never got that as the "core" message and/or belief.
The core message and/or belief was always "Primitive versions of us could never have created such complex feats of engineering[1]", quickly followed on with "even today, we cannot create such things without our recently invented technology".
It's a stretch to leap from "even today, we cannot create such things without our recently invented technology" to "only white people could have created such things."
[1] I also dunno why you added "and civilisation" in there; that's not what I read in any of the Hancock and similar books.
For some reason, it's easier to see the limitations of that approach when it's applied to common everyday things that everyone does, and much harder when it's applied to conspiracy theories.
> The core of ancient alien theory is the belief that non-white races are incapable of complex feats of engineering and civilization
In its origins, but do the current crop of believers think that way? If they do is it an unconscious prejudice or a conscious one? I think there is a spectrum of racism here from complete unawareness of the racist origins, to blatant racism.
There are also some white people's achievements, such as Stonehenge, that they attribute to aliens.
> Dig deep enough under a lot of the folklore, especially where it overlaps with neo-Christian/New World Order stuff and eventually you'll get to the Nazis.
New World Order people do seem to overlap heavily with the "white replacement" crowd, so yes.
>A lot of alien lore has racist elements and origins.
Inasmuch as most of this lore deals directly with the inferiority/superiority of literal races, I think all of alien lore is about racism.
>Also, you're unfortunately wrong about racism - you absolutely can be an out-and-out racist now. People are more openly and proudly racist now than they have been at any point in my own living memory.
Oh, I don't think this is the case - at least, not outside the borders of the USA, anyway. Things were far, far more racist in Europe prior to WW2 - which is not to say that racism has been eradicated, just that it was tempered by the need to acknowledge its ultimate product, in the form of ruined cities that had to be rebuilt. Meanwhile, the U.S. has used technological superiority to assert dominance globally, often over non-Western cultures, as seen in interventions in Iraq or Afghanistan.
UFOs, as symbols of advanced technology, could resonate with this imperialist mindset, reinforcing hierarchies.
For sure, there is a rise in racism within certain states of the Western hemisphere - but there has been a rise in UFO'ism, too - which in my opinion, has allowed for the covert justification of racism, without social retribution, to occur. Leading eventually of course, to more overt racist expression.
The UK is far less racist than it was in the 1980s, and I think the rest of western Europe seems to be generally similar.
That said, while the vast majority are not racist, the racists seem to have got more extreme - I think social media is at least part of the problem there.
They can, but I disagree they do, universally, in all cases. UFOs do tend to follow the cultural zeitgeist and reflect people's fears and stereotypes, maybe about themselves or their own government, but in a broader and more complex sense than "all of alien lore is about racism" would imply. I tend to slot aliens in the same cultural headspace as angels/demons or fae/cryptids, like Jacques Valee (except I don't believe these beings are actually real and imitating our folklore, so much as actually just being folklore.)
For instance,it's interesting how one doesn't hear about alien abductions as often as one used to. Now it's all "interdimensional NHI" and psychic bonding. As if the dehumanizing trauma narratives of Communion served some cathartic purpose that we're now we're moving on from. Also we've moved on from saucers. No one sees saucers anymore, it's all spheres and tic-tacs and "jellyfish."
You might find The Dark Fantastic interesting.
Thanks for the recommendation - I've added it to my list of things to read on the subject, although I fear it may be targeted for a much different audience.
There is a lot of projection in a lot of so-called sci-fi media, especially with regard to "alien invasion" tropes. The idea that some foreign group arrives with vastly superior weapons and technology we don't understand to wipe us out or enslave us for some ulterior motives that possibly don't even make sense to us would sound a bit on the nose unless presented in a politically race-neutral way to a demographic of the historically culturally dominant group. There's certainly a degree of fear of revenge to it, though less blatant than in early zombie media (where zombies were more strongly associated with "voodoo" and implicitly a punishment for colonialism) or even exploitation/horror media like Cannibal Holocaust or Heart of Darkness (and a lot of the media inspired by it like Apocalypse Now) where the threat is explicitly more "primitive" (in the case of Heart of Darkness the threat being a form of contagious primitivism itself) but the dominant group (usually white people) are put in vulnerable positions through circumstance. It's no accident that Lovecraft was legitimately extremely racist.
It's important to remember though that humans are not intrinsically racist. Tribalist maybe, but kinship can spread all superficial boundaries of appearances and cultural differences. Whiteness is not a question of a specific skin color or ethnicity but the absence of "non-white" identifiers and thus ultimately just as arbitrary as Roman citizenship during certain time periods in what we now think of as Europe and Northern Africa. And of course just like Roman citizenship, those delineations exist because they benefited the dominant group within (or the colonial administration) by providing an other.
Meanwhile this site disappears a 1500 comment thread about the Marines being used to crush incredibly peaceful resistance to the unconstitutional regime's White Supremacy. US citizens are being violently kidnapped, and for what?
One of the most frustrating things about UFO propaganda is that it's caused a severe lack of understanding in physics AND astronomy. There absolutely is intelligent life out there, but the chance of any lifeforms figuring out the practically zero option solutions to the problems of interstellar travel might as well be... well, zero. e.g., If we ever crack nuclear fusion and somehow through future magic manage to make that small enough to fit on a ship for energy, a ship traveling fast enough through space for the long, long, long journey to reach another star system colliding with a small rock would produce enough energy via collision to blow up the ship. That's only the tip top of the iceberg for interstellar travel problems.
That thread spent over 12 hours on the front page and we actively intervened multiple times to keep it on the front page that long by overriding flags and flamewar penalties. We also spent hours in the thread managing the flamewars.
That topic is not intellectually interesting. I don’t really come here for politics, and I’d like to believe that neither do most HN readers.
Surely this deserves to be memed along with the classic "fiery but mostly peaceful". <https://imgur.com/gallery/fiery-mostly-peaceful-ItEBAGy>
After all, most of those people are just watching the cars burn...
(Edit: spoofing a recent CNN comment)
"We finally have proof! it's what we've been saying!"
"Of ufos?"
"That the govt wants you to believe in ufos!"
"Oh... well, really?"
"I mean it coulda been messed with, cant trust the govt."
A lot of UFO people (maybe enthusiasts would be a more apt term) are more skeptical of aliens and spaceship stuff than "normies" cause they tend to have experience getting burned. Just comes with the territory I guess.
Try to post a perfectly legitimate photo of something weird looking on a UFO forum and they will forensically tear it apart in a way that would put a lot of more professional outlets to shame.
I've been hearing the whole "the government wants you to believe in aliens thing" since the 90s but it goes back way further. Of course the other thing that comes along with that is believing that a lot of the "true believer" types are shills on account of their obvious and often pretty suspicious connections. The most recent one I can remember is that guy with some sort of military connections and very shady funding that went on Joe Rogan talking about starting a company to study and release technology from a crashed spaceship. The intended audience of that sort of thing is not UFO enthusiasts, it's gullable normal people that just happen to accidentally dip their toes into the subject for a split second.
All in all, my opinion is that the whole thing has been a pretty sloppy display of our governments disinformation and psyop capabilities to the extent that it makes me a little bit worried for our safety. Hopefully the people that got assigned to run the UFO stories were the B team.
We currently have a professional wrestling executive running Education, a "wellness influencer" as Surgeon General, an anti-vax brain worm as the head of HHS, and a reality tv star as the Chief Executive.
I can be vocal. I can inform my elected representatives of my opinions. I can protest. I can defend the rights of those who are being oppressed.
These things have risks, and everyone has to make their own determination as to what risks they are willing to bear. I've decided this is too important to let the risks prevent me from speaking out. That might mean I get arrested, physically harmed, detained, or worse. So be it. I am not going to let my country turn into a dictatorship while I do nothing.
> The fact of the matter is that the people of this country voted for this. It's what they want.
It can look like that, but remember some facts. The popular vote split was 49.8% to 48.3%. Almost 90 million eligible voters didn't cast a vote for president. That is higher than either Trump's or Harris' final vote tally. Only ~32% of eligible voters voted for Trump.
Trump likes to call it a landslide but that's just bluster. Quite a lot of his policies perform awful in polls. Public opinion can be moved.
For some context there were only two companies sharing the building, this company and Newsmax, while Rush Limbaugh studio was right down the road at the time. There were a few developers before me who failed and some problems with a contractor shipping code that didn't work requiring me to figure out how to create a payment system. Nonetheless, I get it online, it works perfect, and they start to get subscribers. I'm watching some of the on demand and some of the scheduled shows realizing that they are injecting ultra right wing political propaganda and conspiracy theories along with movies about Biblical events.
So I give one month notice but I don't tell them why. They offer me a $25,000 raise. I say no again. They offer $1 for any subscription conversion after the first one week free incentive. That one was tough because it would have net several hundred thousand dollars for that first year. They are willing to pay massive salaries to people who help them push the conspiracy theories.
The owner of the company eventually got caught up in an office sex scandal and sold off the service.
I can understand the temptation Joe Rogan submitted to in order to take the money. I had a friend invite me a while back with a spare ticket to the Comedy Mother Ship in Austin for open mic night. Bill Burr did 15 minutes. However throughout the night one amateur comedian after another were making the most disgusting jokes about harming children. What I don't understand about Joe Rogan is how he invites people like that into his home while he has young daughters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Trebek
A pigeon in the dark can be a UFO. Or a bat. Or a satellite, an airplane, literally anything. If I throw a sock out of my window, it would be an UFO to my neighbours. Though "F" in UFO would stand for "Falling" in the sock case.
UFO basically means Unidentified Flying Object (now the term UAP is used more often)
If you believe in UFOs, do you believe that there can be observations of flying objects without any current explanation?
Or does it mean that you believe in little green men or something similar?
Please use the terms UFO, UAP and 'believe' they way they were meant to be used.
I remember when there were huge online discussions about the incorrect use of the term "HTML5" once non-technical people got wind of it, and before that over the use of "internet" versus "web" (and whether it's "the internet" or "the Internet") and of course everyone knows the copypasta about "GNU/Linux" and maybe even the discussions about what a "meme" actually is, etc etc. None of these discussions are fruitful and by insisting on an older dictionary definition over the de facto majority use of a given word you're not demonstrating superior knowledge, intelligence or expertise but quite the opposite when it comes to language development and human interactions.
Words don't mean anything except what the two people using them to communicate with each other assign to them. In one-to-many and many-to-many conversations this means the majority use of the term generally prevails unless the minority use provides immediate superior utility (which is how a lot of slang enters mainstream use). It's all just sloppy lossy soundwaves and unicode strings thrown in each other's general direction - that we can transport ideas at all is nothing short of a miracle of nature.