• Mossy Feathers (They/Them)
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    1011 months ago

    Yeah, I was trying to give a brief summary of it. There are also a lot of details being left out about why UFO fans think this is a step towards disclosure, or why there might (heavy emphasis on might) be something to it.

    Once upon a time the US government actually took those claims seriously, seriously enough that there were multiple air force programs dedicated to trying to figure out what they were. The first was Project Sign, followed by Project Grudge, and finally, the most well known project, Project Blue Book. Over the course of the project (lasted 14yrs), it collected over 12,000 reports. The majority of the reports were easily explainable because most were just misidentified weather balloons, classified aircraft, flares dropped at night, etc.

    However, there were just over 700 reports for which they were unable to come up with a reasonable explanation for. No matter how hard they probed (heh) the reports, they couldn’t find a suitable explanation.

    In the meantime, the US had begun publicly debunking UFOs in anyway possible because the government believed that the rise in UFO sightings was distracting Americans from the Red Scare and cold war. The Robertson Panel was formed with the goal to offer a reasonable explanation for seemingly supernatural phenomenon. However, in reality, they were just there to debunk reports and in the event they couldn’t think of a reasonable explanation, they just made something up. The result is that UFOs were pushed into fringe conspiracy territory, despite there being reports going back to the 50s and 60s which no one was able to provide a good explanation for.

    I think that’s also part of the reason why it’s exploding now. There are a lot of reports which seem plausible, but get buried under heavily debunked pop-culture sightings like Roswell and don’t get enough attention. The explosion is a result of several people who are currently in power, putting their reputations on the line while saying, “non-human, non-human!”