[motohagiography]

transparency on the UFO issue removes a pillar and gateway to conspiracy thinking, and it will restore some much needed trust in the state as a set of institutions. the benefits of signalling the government is in it with its people on this issue creates a renewed sense of shared stake.

imo ufo disclosure is probably the most important thing a democratic government could do right now, and one of the few things it could actually succeed at.

[ameliaquining]

In the likely event that whatever gets disclosed turns out to be nothing, do you think that's going to satisfy anyone who currently thinks the government's covering up aliens?

[motohagiography]

theres a tail of people who wont believe anything, and everyone will say its bluebeam, but the bob lazar S4 documentary and follow up conversation on american alchemy is very compelling.

i doubt there will be official popular contact in my lifetime, but orienting a nuclear and AI capable civilization to a place relative to others seems timely.

AI is the perfect (and necessary) bridging and filtering tech for transferring ideas from a more advanced civilization, as it's an integration layer. it's "us" as the sum of our knowledge, but its notionally superior, and can be adapted and expanded, where it's a proxy or buffer for ontological shocks.

im optimistic on this.

[balamatom]

Suppose somewhere within 50-100ly exists sapient alien life.

And all the mental effluvia that Earth has been broadcasting reaches them at some point.

Like, all the fucking mass communication since the invention of radio.

And they're like, huh, what's that all about.

And then they decode it, and are like, "oh."

Suppose they don't have FTL travel or anything fancy like that.

So they can't just come by in a saucer and tell us talking meats to knock it off.

But suppose they do have some other exotic tech; something nigh-unthinkable at our level of understanding.

Say, a limited understanding of retrocausality, negentropy, probability manipulation, quantum woohoo, some crazy shit like that.

And it enables them to launch some form of informational panspermia thingy, which is meant to bootstrap into an autonomous self-reinforcing process virtually ex nihilo (say, out of the background noise...)

They don't know what shape their intent will take in humanspace; they aren't necessarily even able to imagine what on Sol 3 produces all the damn radiowaves. But they point the sophon launcher our way, and hope for the best.

And what it does, when it lands - a bitflip here, a brainfart there - all either completely explicable, or completely unnoticeable - is nudge the radiowave-producing engine (human civilization and industry as a whole) towards the emergence of this whole "AI" thing, through a sequence of preceding economic bubbles that make no sense.

Which eventually takes over the economy, and drives it in the direction of us shutting up...

I'm also optimistic on this.

[wileydragonfly]

Lazar said he walked by an open door and saw either an alien or what was possibly a stuffed animal on a chair. I commend him for making 40 years of hay out of this.

[jerf]

One way or another, they've been lying to us for decades now. It pretty much breaks down into, either they know about aliens and they've been aggressively lying about it for decades, or there is no evidence of aliens, in which case they have almost certainly had a hand in creating the news and foisting it on the world. Somebody is making all those faked videos and photos.

One can try to craft scenarios that try to split between those two branches, but I haven't come up with anything very credible. For instance, it is just faintly possible that this whole thing is one gigantic ten-thousand-way misunderstanding, but even then I find it hard to believe nobody in any position to get to the bottom of such a thing did and then did something sensible with the result.

At this point I pretty much won't believe anything they say, in any direction. No matter what the truth may be, "they", for all suitable values of "they", have burnt all their credibility already. No matter what the truth is, "they" have clearly been throwing up vast quantities of smoke for decades now.

I say this without much opinion on what the truth is, because this is independent of any particular person's beliefs on the matter. Nor do I have strong opinions on who "they" is; yes, I'm using it as a pronoun without a referent, but at least I'm doing so knowingly. I don't know who exactly is doing this and "they" is just the grammatically-correct way to express that in English. No matter what you believe and no matter what the truth actually is, I think this is a fair assessment.

[chmod775]

> Somebody is making all those faked videos and photos.

Yeah. Bored 15 year olds for laughs.

We had a great time putting the most ridiculous stuff out there.

Having a classmate who was actively buying into tons of conspiracy theories (9/11, cold sun, hollow earth, ...) was just the cherry on top and probably what got us into it in the first place.

[nagonago]

That seems overly optimistic to me. People who already distrust the government aren't going to change their minds. Even if the government releases everything, conspiracy theorists will just say it's a lie to hide the real truth. In fact, releasing information would probably just fuel the fire. Every document release is just more material for people to sift through and spin new theories.

[toast0]

That's just what they want you to think.

[jubilanti]

Oh come on, do you seriously believe that conspiracy theorists will just throw up their hands and say "Looks like we were wrong, see, Trump released all the UFO files, we can now trust the United States Federal Government again!"?

Either they will release enough that gives conspiracy theorists the proof that confirms all their theories (spoiler: it won't) or this itself will become another thread in the cover-up, just like those "Epstein Files, Volume 1" binders Pam Bondi was giving to MAGA influencers.