[jrowen]

I don't think these are dumb questions at all

They're not, but they're also somewhat orthogonal to "UFO culture." You're describing a philosophical/sociopolitical discussion that isn't really informed by a blip on a grainy video frame.

The question that's more relevant to UFOs, in my opinion, is "Why would these aliens, with their unimaginably superior technology, travel all the way here and reveal themselves in such asinine ways?" Did they intend to come all this way to do some cryptic and spooky display for a small number of people? Did they simply slip up and briefly drop their cover?

I just don't see it. I fully believe that, if there were aliens out there with such capabilities, and they came to earth, they would either conceal themselves fully or reveal themselves intentionally (and not just to a handful of people in a remote area).

[jablongo]

Your last point is a good one, but there are a many ways that you could be wrong. To name one: The Von Neumann probe is a compelling model and it is more likely that we would see something fitting that description rather than the original form of an extraterrestrial intelligence. We have no good reason to think that such an advanced civilization would have mastered faster than light communication either. So the behavior of these cylinders, assuming they are VN probes, may only be simplistic surveying routines which have been running for tens of thousands of years and were not at all designed for interacting with humans. There may also be resource constraint issues present in the construction of self replicating Von Neumann probes that make the type of interaction you are hoping for infeasible, in terms of compute, agenda, or something else we aren’t aware of.

[jrowen]

That’s true, though I suspect in that case it would be a known object with ample evidence (a la Rendezvous With Rama) or undetected.

It’s definitely possible to imagine a scenario where a handful of people or “the government” somehow witnessed the only fleeting evidence of its existence in our atmosphere, but it still seems exceedingly unlikely.

[jolincost]

But haven't we almost mastered faster than light communication with quantum entangled radios?

[tmn]

I’ve been looking through these ufo threads and haven’t seen anyone address the third explanation. I’m somewhat impulsively replying to you as your might receive this well. Most of the credible ufo phenomenon is likely a psyop. I won’t get into why the cia or other would put forth such efforts beyond reciting the quote “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false”. It’s “controversial” if William Casey actually said that, but this fills in the gaps that can’t be explained away by witness confusion or delusion, without requiring a belief in some unseen technology that’s always conveniently dangled out of sight. The cia also says they’ve been doing telepathy, astral projection, and the like. The disinformation program is definitely real.

[jolincost]

Sure but in regards to remote viewing it is in fact a real thing, so there's a degree to which the existence of disinformation is not a confirmation of nonexistence of some underlying reality.

Btw, i think you may have meant to put credible in quotes, otherwise it's an oxymoron... as, in "Credible ufos are actually psyops."

I'm confident a lot of information is disinformation I think that your hypothesis that most or all is is probably false and maybe you can see they too if you examine the range of documents in the CIA FOIA reading room, the testimony of people, the work required to create all of these different documents in different formats with all of this different information about people's names and departments from the correct historical time period the correspond to you know correct historical designations and departments, it just seems way too much work for it to make sense. What are they getting from this? I think you need a credible explanation of the payoff to justify such an enormous investment of manpower and time.

From another view, if you have the standard where way you claim that the ROI of remote viewing programs was so low there was no point to them (when in fact there's declassified documentation of them being a reliable intelligence source commensurate with other sources, as well as it easily observable reality of various subreddits dedicated to people practicing this and getting results) then it seems doubly true that you know the return on investment of such a massive disinfo program, where there is no documentation of payoff and there's no obvious payoff, is unimaginably low.

it's basically a sort of insane elaboration that doesn't pass the Occam's razor test the simplest explanation is that these are simply reports of real things that happened. so definitely there will be disinformation because that makes sense from a narrative management point of view but I think it's becoming crazier and crazier to deny the simple and obvious explanation that all of this documentation describes something real.

However....One thing I do wonder about though, and I think is a bit odd is why is all of this so-called UFO and disclosure information promoted by mostly white American men. Where are the women where are the black people (besides Billy Carson) where are the Asian people where are the Chinese coming out with their disclosure information...that seems weird to me but I think if you wanted a credible program you would probably you know enlist people from other countries just like you know regular you know counterintelligence disinformation campaigns do. So it's weird to me that it's so heterogeneous. if there is a secret space program where are all the female whistleblowers coming forward.

[vageli]

> I just don't see it. I fully believe that, if there were aliens out there with such capabilities, and they came to earth, they would either conceal themselves fully or reveal themselves intentionally (and not just to a handful of people in a remote area).

After having read Roadside Picnic, I'm inclined to disagree. If sufficiently advanced aliens ever happened upon us they might treat us as we treat ants in our backyards—that is, they don't really notice or care for us at all.

[resu_nimda]

I’m not familiar with the book, but

1) I don’t think the analogy of ambling around our backyards holds for space travel. Space is vast and largely empty, it would be astronomically unlikely for anyone to casually wander over to earth from another star or galaxy.

2) We only treat ants that way because we already know about them. People have noticed them and studied them at great length. A person who doesn’t know that other animals exist on earth would probably be incredibly fascinated by them and likely try to communicate with them.