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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?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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).