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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Back to aliens again- I haven’t seen this posted yet. https://abc7.com/amp/mexico-aliens-corpses-ufos/13776957/

Tdlr is Mexico’s congress has what are claimed to be mummified alien bodies ‘with eggs inside’ which is a significant escalation if you assume they’re copying the US congress.

Now obviously I don’t believe in aliens, and it’s going to take a bit more effort than that to convince me. But one government is pushing an aliens narrative, and now a different government which has a lot of official tensions with it is pushing an aliens narrative. There’s got to be some reason governments would do aliens.

My question is why? Is it something that just makes sense to government officials?

When something is presented to a legislature, that doesn't mean the whole legislature endorses it, just that some members found it interesting enough to present. The congress has over 600 members. I'm sure most are intelligent and don't believe in aliens, but it only takes a few. And belief in extraterrestrials is popular - polls find >1/3 of americans believe - so it's very plausible some congress members just genuinely believe. Or are pandering to constituents who do, or trying to get attention. This parsimoniously explains why 'governments do aliens', without reaching for any hidden strategy. Imo, this explains every case of 'large institution endorsing UFOs', one of which I described here.

Here's a better article.

The UFO researcher [who presented this], who appears regularly in Mexican media to present his purported findings, has previously been associated with claims of discoveries that have later been debunked. In 2015, Maussan unveiled the existence of what was alleged to be an alien body unearthed in Nazca, Peru. Later, though, that "alien" discovery was debunked, and the mummified corpse was shown to be that of a human child with a head deformity, according to fact-checking website snopes.com. In fact, such elongated skulls have often been explained by anthropologists as the result of an ancient practice of artificial cranial deformation. As a part of what could be an ancient religious ritual, young children had their heads bound in cloth, rope and even wooden boards, according to snopes.com.

That’s almost exactly what I was looking for, thanks. I’m just going to assume the Mexican congress is weird enough to present a high-effort hoax every once in a while.