[ccity88]

I know this is a joke, but can we for a second take a step back to marvel at how we're now watching US Congressional hearings about UAP's, where the word "Aliens" and "Extra-terrestrial life" was mentioned several times? I feel like I'm living through the beginning of a sci-fi movie.

More to the point, why is it always people in the US that have credible or semi credible (or for that matter ANY) evidence of UAP's, UFO's etc? The earth is a big place, why is it always the US they choose to visit? Is Botswana not good enough? Is Europe not technologically advanced enough? Does South America not send the right message?

[boveus]

I assume there is some particular combination of factors at play here:

The US has a very advanced military and intelligence apparatus which operates globally.

The US has an enormous area that it operates in domestically (large areas of both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans).

The US also has a relatively open culture and emphasizes free speech.

When you look at all of these factors it seems that by having all of them it makes it a lot more likely for people to detect UAPs and then talk about them. The other thing that might be at play here is that, as an American, I have no idea what a credible news source would be from Botswana and it is unlikely to be in English even if I would consume it in the first place.

[classified]

If only we had known this earlier, we would never have crashed our spacecraft in Botswana!

[sschueller]

Exactly but when you bring this up you get attacked. Sure there might be extraterrestrial life and no one is doubting this possibility but that they would focus on only the US and only get seen I the US is quite self centered.

Also don't forget how would we approach another planet if we had the tech to go there. The life forms on that planet may appear to us a monkeys or even ants and we would probably just ignore them.

[suby]

> but that they would focus on only the US and only get seen I the US is quite self centered.

Because it isn't true. I started paying attention to UFO's after the 2017 new york times article on the subject, and yes, there is a perception that it's a US only phenomenon, but it's a misconception. I do not have a link to point you to, but UFO's are being reported world wide, and there have been some famous cases outside the US (as far as UFO cases get famous) such as the school, Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki Ariel School UFO incident.

[junaru]

> when you bring this up you get attacked

Good, ignorance should not be rewarded. Start by googling COMETA report, Rendlesham, Ariel or the flavour of the month - Varginha.

[mistermann]

Is a lack of an attack a reward?

[dleslie]

> More to the point, why is it always people in the US that have credible or semi credible (or for that matter ANY) evidence of UAP's, UFO's etc?

That's selection bias from our media reporting on it. MUFON has tracked sightings from all over the world.

https://mufon.com/

[OscarCunningham]

The US has the most people travelling long empty roads and getting Highway Hypnosis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis

[jedberg]

> More to the point, why is it always people in the US that have credible or semi credible (or for that matter ANY) evidence of UAP's, UFO's etc?

The US is one of the only countries with the resources to explore such things?

Or maybe because the US is the fourth largest country by land mass, and the only bigger ones are Russia, China, and Canada. China probably would keep it a secret, as would Russia. And we would probably process Canada's. And in fact you do hear about stuff over Russia all the time.

[programmarchy]

Being a kook and a congressman (or intelligence officer) are not mutually exclusive. I haven't really seen anything credible, have you? It's always some ambiguous statement like "I've been told by a high ranking official...", "It appears to be not of this planet..." which puts my bullshit detector on full blast.

[SkyMarshal]

Assuming this isn’t just a big psyop trying to scare US adversaries, and that UFO’s are real… the US was the first to detonate nukes in 1945, on its own territory, which might explain some of the UFO interest. Maybe the UFO’s were investigating how scientifically and technologically advanced humanity was becoming, and naturally focused on nuclear tech as a leading indicator.

Also, the 1936 Berlin Olympics TV broadcast was the first human signal capable of detection from distant space, and might have alerted them to humanity. Travel time of the broadcast plus travel time of UFO’s to Earth (assuming they have lightspeed capability) might have resulted in them arriving right around when nukes were invented (if they’re from, say, Alpha Centauri which is 4 light-years away).

Finally, the US and Europe have free press where things like this are more likely to be publicly reported than in say, the USSR back in the day, or China under the CCP. Which, in conjunction with the above, may explain sightings maps like this one, where sightings are most frequent in the US and secondarily in Europe:

https://updb.app/map?zoom=1.00&lon=149.0917&lat=37.3003

Also, if you search number of reports by date ranges, and choose an arbitrary cutoff at, say, 1944, look at what you get (I would need to see all this data graphed to see when the real inflection point to cut at is, so I'm just guessing here):

1-1943: 1566 sightings reports

1944-2023: 294,641 sightings reports

Two orders of magnitude more sightings reports in the 80yrs since nukes were invented, vs in the almost two millennia previously. Obviously we also had more robust and technologically advanced media in the latter time frame, so that contributes much to the discrepancy. But still a huge discrepancy.

[tobrien6]

UAP sightings and encounters are a global phenomenon, documented by civilians and military/government individuals and declassified documents going back decades. If you begin even cursory research into the topic, you'll discover as much.

[shiny]

Ya, one of my favorite cases actually occurred next door to Botswana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_School_UFO_incident

[quacked]

> The earth is a big place, why is it always the US they choose to visit?

Since almost all credible English-speaking UFO sightings (i.e. someone actually saw something strange in the sky and isn't delusional or lying) have been US military hardware, it stands to reason that the US has been the site of a lot of sightings reported in English. The only other really obvious places where you might see this kind of stuff is rural Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, or China, and I don't know what kind of things the locals have been primed to believe or say when they see strange lights in the sky.

[RajT88]

There's been a lot in Brazil, actually. Brazil, like the US, has a lot of land and a lot of people.

[nomel]

> The earth is a big place, why is it always the US they choose to visit?

From what I saw, in the interviews, the claim is that we are not the only country.

[dingnuts]

It's not just the US, but the intelligence agencies who for some reason are the people that ET has chosen to reach out to and have the sole evidence and knowledge of the extraterrestrials. You know, the people who lied to the world about the presence of WMDs in Iraq 15 years ago. They have received communication with ET nobody else has and they have evidence if we just trust them.

Yeah. Sure.

[scandox]

They're just very open-minded in the US.

[imdsm]

Life feels more and more like a Sci Fi movie. Also consider that the US is one of the few nations with such advanced sensor technology, and also the one that likely flies the most training runs, patrols etc.

The hearing today, especially how much we didn't hear, was fascinating.

"Non-human" rather than "extra-terrestrial", I feel, was said a few times to try and tell us something. Perhaps they don't come from far away. Perhaps they come from outside, or perhaps they are from here.

When did they begin to show up?

What if nuclear blasts had an effect outside what we knew?

So many questions.

[OfSanguineFire]

> What if nuclear blasts had an effect outside what we knew?

Wait, isn’t this the plot of Twin Peaks: The Return?

The news today is reporting that it was David Grusch, already not taken very seriously, who testified on the presence of “non-human” biological material found at crash sites. You know what that claim is compatible with? Putting an ape into an advanced drone in order to test the effect of its flight on life. You know, just like was done in the 1950s for space research.

[akomtu]

If I were to make a sci-fi plot, I'd say the first nuclear blast in a US desert (Mohave?) spooked the aliens because they happen to live somewhere around that desert, in a "different dimension" so to say. To them the blast was a spike of hard radiation of unexplained origin. After digging into it, they've realized the relationship with us (to their astonishment) and developed an entire new branch of science about cross-dimension space travel. Now they can regularly send equivalents of bathyscaphes to our plane and observe us. They don't space travel as we imagine it, they rather submerge. The bathyscaphes protect their bodies from instant disintegration, but they already have a prototype of a space-suit that will let them leave the bathyscaphe. In the meantime they've been dropping some artifacts to steer our civilization in the desired direction. They really want us to develop an advanced machine civilization because they have means of directly connecting to a certain type of machines. As for their goals, it's the same goals that we have for Mars or Moon: explore and colonize because we can, perhaps find some minerals.

[systems_glitch]

They put mayonnaise on pizza in Botswana!