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Pentagon Has Been Pushing Americans to Believe in UFOs for Decades, New Report
- Mistletoe 1y agoMy 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 1y agoThat twist was briefly mentioned in season 6, episodes 4 and 5.
- throwaway290 1y agoMulder went all in on aliens are a ruse to hide government misdeeds for season 5. not going to spoil what it was actually
- Mistletoe 1y agoThank you we are only on Season 4 right now!
- throwaway290 1y agoI feel bad about mentioning it:) There is a movie which I heard chronologically is between season 5 and 6, I skipped it because I didn't know about it at the time but can be worth watching once you get there...
- Mistletoe 1y agoIt's ok, this show goes all over the place, Mulder will explore every theory through Brownian motion eventually I assumed. I can't wait to see the movie!
- dgllghr 1y agoAnd 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?
- charintstr 1y agoYeah 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
- jl6 1y agoThe 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 1y agoAlternatively, 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 1y agoYep. 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.
- ashirviskas 1y agoDo 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 1y agoBecause, 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 1y agoEveryone knows that UFO is for normies and UAP is for whack job truthers :D
- rkomorn 1y agoAppropriate username for this post. XD
- anton-c 1y agoThis 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."
- throwaway290 1y agoI'm watching the x files and it's so funny how similar it is
- UltraSane 1y agoDid they use Alex Trebek to make people's testimony less believable?
- throwaway290 1y agoNot 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 1y agoAlex is best known (in general, if you know nothing else about him) for being the host of Jeopardy from 1984 until 2021. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Trebek https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Trebek
- UltraSane 1y agoAlex 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
- throwaway290 1y agoI am remembering that ep while watching s06e19 now! I didn't watch Jeopardy (not from the US) so not familiar with the face.
- davewasthere 1y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/odqjef/this_is_a_map_of_all_reported_ufo_sightings/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/odqjef/this_is_a_m... I don't know about you, but I'm skeptical.
- abcd_f 1y agoThis is wildly off. Russia alone should be as bright as the US.
- mellow_observer 1y agoThat 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 1y agoMuch 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.
- K0balt 1y 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…
- cedws 1y agoThe 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 1y agoHow did they manage that without resistance from the lizard people? Is that the real story here?
- nobodyandproud 1y agoClearly they are the lizard people. Perhaps the next wave of space immigration. V (the 1980s version) was a flawed documentary.
- ZeroGravitas 1y agoFun 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.
- nobodyandproud 1y agoNice. This is the first I’ve heard-of or read about Huey Long: "When he was gone it seemed that a beneficent peace had fallen on the land. Father Coughlin, Reno, Townsend, et al., were after all pygmies compared with Huey. He had been a major phenomenon." The demagogue party has flipped, but of course we’re living with the consequences all the same.
- aa-jv 1y agoDisclaimer: 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. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book) [1] - https://archive.org/details/lureofedgescient0000bren https://archive.org/details/lureofedgescient0000bren [2a] - https://ia800203.us.archive.org/17/items/MessengersOfDeceptionUFOContactsAndCultsJacquesValle1979/Messengers%20of%20Deception%20UFO%20Contacts%20and%20Cults%2C%20Jacques%20Vallée%20%281979%29.pdf https://ia800203.us.archive.org/17/items/MessengersOfDecepti... [2b] - https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/biases/Experiments%20inIntergroup%20Discrimination%20Tajfel%201970001.pdf https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/biases/Experime... [3] - See, also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wretched_of_the_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wretched_of_the_Earth
- lwansbrough 1y agoMy 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?
- DocTomoe 1y agoSee also: Nazi Germany's "Wunderwaffen", Hanebu, et al.
- ahartmetz 1y agoYour 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 1y ago"delivered something" was too-often true - but in the bigger picture, many of them delivered a clearly-negative RoI for Germany.
- ahartmetz 1y agoThe 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 1y agoI'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 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".
- Dachande663 1y agoThe original WSJ article for those who want it: https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ufo-us-disinformation-45376f7e https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ufo-us-disinf... And a paywall pass: https://archive.is/vTPII https://archive.is/vTPII
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoComments worth checking out if you want to see how this new information is dismissed to maintain the purity of the original hypothesis.
- deepfakestate 1y agoof 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 1y agoThis 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.
- UltraSane 1y agoSo much talk about UFOs and so little hard evidence
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- netbioserror 1y agoI'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 1y agowhen 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 1y agoAnd 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.
- eth0up 1y agoPaul Bennewitz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bennewitz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bennewitz Edit: may as well too, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_12 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_12
- ochrist 1y agoWhat 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 1y agothis 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 1y agoThe 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.
- dudefeliciano 1y agorelevant CCC talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-12326-you_ve_just_been_fucked_by_psyops https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-12326-you_ve_just_been_fucked_by...
- xtiansimon 1y agoOr, 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 1y agoIf 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
- falcor84 1y ago> 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.
- georgeburdell 1y agoIt’s important to note that “Spring of 2023” lines up with David Grusch going public
- overu589 1y ago[flagged]
- overu589 1y ago[flagged]
- foobarbecue 1y agoI really don't mean this as an insult: please seek psychiatric advice.
- overu589 1y agoHey, great site! The voices in our heads are real pal, and you are a denier of the exogenous of thought control.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sharpshadow 1y agoTwo 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.
- overu589 1y ago[flagged]
- overu589 1y agoHypocrites
- afpx 1y agoWere you a participant in Stargate? https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate
- overu589 1y agoBetter, 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.
- aisenik 1y ago[flagged]
- slumberlust 1y agoI was wondering where that thread went...disappointing but not the first or last time it will happen.
- tomhow 1y agoIt was on the front page for 12 hours.
- gmerc 1y ago[flagged]
- aisenik 1y agoGuys who built the reality-destroying thought-control panopticon getting high off their own supply. Real Fermi Paradox stuff.
- hnbad 1y agoThe funny thing is that this likely isn't even people like dang intentionally yanking that post. The design of how community self-moderation works and the makeup of the site's demographic makes it easy for this to happen without any clear ill intent. "No politics", I insist, as I push the final commits for the orphan grinding machine.
- computerthings 1y ago[dead]
- nineplay 1y agoI guess they figured out that people could still see <flagged> posts by going to /active. Disgusting.
- southernplaces7 1y agoRegardless 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.
- speak_plainly 1y agoI’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.
- m4r1k 1y agoAs somebody who witnessed a UFO several years ago, I call this BS.
- darqis 1y agoSo Dr. Greer is really a 3 letter agent?