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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2110 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 21, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Why does the bulk of the evidence of extraterrestrial life that people focus on recently seem to come from the government rather than from scientists? It seems that every time you listen to the latest news on the topic, the government is providing wild claims while mainstream scientists seem to accept or provide nearly nothing as evidence of ET life.

I usually like Ross Douthat but I recently watched his video with Diana Pasulka regarding UFOs and ETs. I am not predisposed to making accusations of government plants everywhere but the interview was so bizarre that it felt like she was just a plant to sow chaos and confusion in the space to me. I have always felt that the term "UAP" was suspicious as it is exactly the sort of SEO hashtag you would create if an entity wanted to track and analyze a certain specific narrative or conversation around a topic that already exists but within a specific context (like government-synthesized data.)

I have always had nightmares about UFOs and found aliens very scary. Have any of you ever seen a UFO or encountered an alien?

Parts of the U.S. Government like the alien narrative as a cheap way to signal that you’re totally a radical free-thinker. You know, one who cares about what the people want. The current administration has selected really hard for a certain willingness to burn credibility for attention.

Professional scientists, who are not usually elected based on economic and social vibes, have different incentives.

If other governments are joining in on the fun, I haven’t really seen it.

I have never seen a UFO, and kinda agree with you. That being said, there are totally actual scientists making the podcast circuit talking about aliens. Dr Beatriz Villaruel is one of the more prominent examples.

Their actual peer reviewed publications are much more cautious and conservative, but you also presumably don’t have the advanced degrees necessary to understand them.

There are loads of exoplanets, dust clouds with organic chemicals, and strange radio sources discovered every week. The reason you never hear about them is that you need an advanced background in spectroscopy to make sense out of the data.

Why does the bulk of the evidence of extraterrestrial life that people focus on recently seem to come from the government rather than from scientists?

It's a strategy for countering the influence of conspiracy theorists. Throw a little alien chum in the water and watch them a) get distracted from ranting about Israel; b) make themselves look insane to an audience that might otherwise be receptive to their anti-government conspiracy theories.

I dunno, thé why files guy got one shotted into aliens and UFO’s, and he’d been talking about psychic powers before hand- and is the current king of mass market conspiracy theories.

Yes, and aliens and UFOs and Atlantis put conspiracy theorists firmly in the "harmless crank" box. Maybe fun and interesting, maybe you even think they might have a point, but you're not going to do anything about it.

When they get more into the ZOG, Epstein, Bilderberg, Pizzagate, fixing the NBA draft lottery stuff, and especially when events seem to be confirming what they're saying, such that normies start listening to their schizo rants and saying "Gee, sure seems like they might be right..." that can be threatening to the establishment.

So the government chums the water with some UFO stuff. And the guys that were putting together the Epstein information, or talking about AIPAC, suddenly they're talking about ALIEN ABDUCTIONS.

And the normies who were maybe starting to listen on the AIPAC stuff, now they're reminded oh no this guy is a crank, I can ignore him. I'm sure Israel is the good guy.

The people going off on aliens were already talking about Atlantis and government witchcraft programs and Bigfoot, that's my point. It’s not converting the antisemites and Epsteiners. It’s converting thé people ranting about Nazi bases in Antarctica and psychic spies.

Imagine you and our learned friend in argument SecureSignals are at a party in college. You both spot the same blonde, and you're both hitting on her. She seems to like you, you're hitting it off, but then SecureSignals starts telling her about his interest in chemical engineering and ground penetrating radar and she might like him better. You want the girl, what do you do?

You bring up the Jews. You mention how much you loved the movie Schindler's List. Because you know that SecureSignals, however interesting and attractive he might be otherwise, will be unable to resist talking about how the design of the gas chamber makes no sense and the bodies were never found and it would be mathematically impossible to burn that many bodies and it's likely most of the Jews died in Soviet captivity. And that's going to scare the hoes.

I understand your point, these guys were all ALIENS guys before any disclosures. But when they're a threat, you want to bring the ALIENS stuff to the front to scare the hoes and discredit the "Dark Money From AIPAC might influence US foreign policy" stuff. It's a foolproof trigger. JFK assassination stuff works pretty well too.

Again, these guys were not ‘AIPAC influence in US policy’ and ‘inconsistencies in the Epstein flight logs’ guys. They were ‘the CIA is using witchcraft to circumvent constitutional restrictions on domestic spying’ guys. They were Atlantean ley lines in the capital guys. They were Silurian hypothesis guys.

I understand the kook sniping point, except that if so, it didn’t work. The guys that bit already had insane hoe scaring ideas that violated the laws of physics because they were fictional.

It's not designed to give them the ideas inception style, it's designed to make them talk about them today.

Let's test your hypothesis. When specifically do you mean by "today"? and why?

Why would the government prefer people who believe in ley lines and the silurian hypothesis focus on roswell coverups instead?

This is not the equivalent of bringing up something jew-related when securesignals is chatting up a cute blonde you fancy. This is the equivalent of walking up to a ranting homeless guy accosting her with theories about the blood drinking shape-shifting lizards putting a chip in his brain and inviting him to the David Duke/Minister Farrakhan conference about whether white and black can and should unite against their common enemy, the Jews.

What a fascinating twist on that one scene from A Beautiful Mind.

Actually what I was thinking of.

The play isn't to go for the brunette, it's to start an obscure math argument among your dork friends.

Only for Feynman to score the triple.

The reality is it's even stupider than this: the reason the American government is so brain-fried and obsessed with aliens is because it's full of Americans (heaven help us all).

What is the latest UAP craze about? You are right, it is strange and sus. Even veteran UFO researchers are bewildered what is it about.

Non exhausting list of possibilities:

1/ Slow disclosure.

Aliens are real and USG is ready to disclose it to the public, in slow drips to prevent muggles from panicking.

2/ Blue Beam scenario.

Aliens are not real, but USG plans to fake alien contact to establish New World Order(TM). When ayyys tell the masses to live in pods and eat bugs, the muggles better to comply.

3/ The flying tictacs are red.

Aliens are not real. The objects in the sky are real and are Chinese Star Trek tier technology developed in secret. USG is panicking, desperately searching for countermeasures and in the mean time tries to prevent panic among muggles.

4/ The flying tictacs are red, white and blue.

Aliens are not real. The objects in the sky are real and are US Star Wars tier technology developed in secret. Were you thinking that the trillions of dollars spent on GWOT were really wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan?

These superweapons are reserved for final struggle with China, and USG is trying to deceive China in the mean time, so they will come as complete surprise.

5/ Wilderness of mirrors

No one know what is real and what is not, least of all USG experts. It is all some complicated inside game muggles have no hope of understanding.

6/ One big nothingburger

It's not real, there are no conspiracies, just grifters, scammers and mentally ill people doing things for their own purposes. Nothing to see there.

Adding into the mix something that the government sources themselves have suggested, which is, basically, "our research/reverse engineering efforts are hitting dead ends because we have the program buttoned up too tight and we need to open the programs up to more minds."

Okay, that’s a pretty silly excuse.

Paranoid conspiracy theories have got to be the worst form of recruitment for a research program.

Maybe I did a poor job of communicating.

I think the government coming out and saying "we have a crashed non-human craft, any of you eggheads want to come look at it?" it would generate a lot of research interest, don't you? Even saying "yeah okay UFOs are real and we don't know what they are, but we need help figuring it out" would probably garner some interest from boffins, right?

The government sources OP are referring to have been conducting a coordinated pressure/PR campaign that can be interpreted in a few different ways, but one possible goal of the campaign is to get the government to admit to the above (and they basically succeeded on the second half, and have gotten some corresponding interest from boffins, which has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread).

The best argument against them is that it would be pretty much impossible to hide. Small objects in orbit are easy to track, anything entering out solar system at relativistic speeds and then braking to land on Earth would be detected. The power of the radio-waves required to send signals back to the alien solar system would be detected.

Aliens being hidden from us would require multiple governments to collaborate and cover up aliens. If the information regarding aliens is under absolute lockdown the only information available is from governments.

If aliens were widespread in our solarsystem we would have detected something by now. A major civilization isn't going to be silent.

Just pointing out for the sake of thoroughness that this is an argument against interstellar visitors, which =! UFOs.

Assuming known physics is all that is out there, you are right.

There ain't no stealth in space, you can do many things in space, but not hide.

Of course, there is no guarantee that we really reached the bottom of science tree and there are no unknown unknowns out there.

you can do many things in space, but not hide.

This is entirely wrong btw, the US government has stealth satellites in orbit right now.

(Atomic Rockets is a great resource though).

The "stealth" satellites are not stealthy, their orbits are well known and their mass is roughly estimated. You can observe them yourself with rather modest equipment.

What is unknown is their capability and their mission.

Neither KH-11 nor Topaz are stealth satellites of the low-observable Misty line, although objects believed to be stealth satellites have been tracked by amateur astronomers.

Atomic Rockets (on the page you linked to) has a pretty good write-up by Matterbeam on stealth in space, but I recommend reading up on his treatment of a hydrogen streamer.

It's certainly true that, given sufficiently proliferated sensor technology, "there's no stealth in space." But it's also true that, given sufficiently proliferated sensor technology, there's no stealth anywhere, whether it's submarines or stealth aircraft. Keep in mind the question for stealth is not "can remain invisible at any arbitrary range," it is "can you disrupt the hostile kill chain enough to gain an advantage?"

In the real world, sensors aren't sufficiently proliferated, which is why there are submarines, stealth aircraft, and yes, stealth satellites.

Wouldn't Aliens being here almost certainly assume faster than light travel?

No. The Milky Way is 13 billion years old, but only 100,000 light years across. A sufficiently advanced civilization would be able to colonize the galaxy using only sublight tech.

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