[peepeepoopoo3]

This article [1] was written two years ago about the US government trying to pass off chinese spy balloons as UFOs in order to save face. It's shocking how quickly the public took up the UFO narrative, given that there were multiple confirmed spy balloons just 24 hours earlier. The same people wringing their hands over "disinformation" are the ones telling you that it's alien flying saucers and not enemy spy aircraft.

[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones...

[isp]

HN comments on this article (7 days ago, 127 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34683545

[rcostin2k2]

Sometimes it's easier to accept an "out-of-the-box" idea than to accept that your defence has failed.

[TeMPOraL]

I wonder how many UFO stories are just unintended consequences of internal ass covering and procedural hacks.

Imagine there was an incident involving one or more flying objects, perfectly mundane and of terrestrial origin, being seen where they shouldn't have been, or misidentified in an embarrassing way. The kind of incident that would, normally, get some of the people involved fired. Except in this case, recorded evidence is scant and inconclusive enough that the people in question can report it upstairs as UFO sighting, and thus get to keep their jobs. Protocol having been followed, nobody bothers them about it.

Fast forward some amount of years, and the report ends up being leaked, declassified, or just read by the wrong person - either way, the public gets wind of it. What then? It would be nice for the government to tell the public what really happened, but the only people in position to do so are the ones who would get fired or imprisoned the moment they admit it might have not been an UFO after all. So of course they'll stay out of the spotlight, and hum the "X-Files" theme when asked directly.

In such cases, there would be no aliens, no secret military hardware - nothing The Government tries to keep silent about. Just ordinary people covering an ordinary fuckup with an unusual story, and sticking to it over the years.