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Nathan Taylor's avatar

I know we wont' agree on this. But FWIW, I think calling this an intentional hoax misses the most essential aspect of what's going on. The organizational incentives to find stuff and misrepresent it are extremely powerful and strong. As Feynman says, the easiest person to fool is yourself. Add on top of this security measures and using them as a political screen to avoid open scrutiny, and what happens is no deliberate hoax is needed. Just a game of telephone were incentives are strong to exaggerate. And intelligence agencies during a cold war are very similar in terms of internal incentives.

I think it's great you are taking UFOs are a serious topic and working through possible scenarios. The Eden idea is excellent and original idea as a scenario possibility.

But we should not assume the data itself is reliable and put there as a deliberate hoax. It's bad data exaggerated and people fooling themselves. We won't agree on this, but I still believe that's a reasonable position. Your solution assumes far more competence in government than mine. Which I guess shows your prior that people in governments are super smart and never do anything dumb. :)

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Ben's avatar

I think by far the most likely explanation is that a group of influential people in the Pentagon have become true believers in alien origins for UFOs, and enthusiastically interpret ambiguous evidence as confirmation of their beliefs.

This is described here: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/03/07/how-believers-paranormal-birthed-pentagons-new-hunt-ufos.html

I predict that they really believe that there is unambiguous evidence of alien origin craft, but it will turn out that they just misinterpreted weird earthly technology (like aerogels) or fell for hoaxes.

It sounds unlikely that hard-headed military men would behave like that, but elements of the US military-industrial complex enthusiastically pursued psychic remote viewing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project - and hippy warrior monks - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Earth_Battalion

I like your idea that maybe for some reason, like civilisational decay, the aliens are far less powerful than you'd expect, and that explains why they are so easy to detect.

Maybe the squishy bio pilots are constructs designed to spread disinformation - see The Forge of God by Greg Bear for a well-written example of hostile aliens using a bio puppet to mislead humans.

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