• @AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    26
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    This looks more like a map of any English speaking news source I would see online. I mean I see us politics and us topics on lemmy and my local newspaper all the time, but hardly ever hear anything from far away places like Ghana, Romania, south America, middle east or south east asia unless in specifically look for it on some lesser known sites.

    • @KevonLooney@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      1611 months ago

      The official language of Ghana is English. They have plenty of news online, you just don’t know about it.

      It’s not English that aliens are attracted to, we are imagining them. UFOs appeared when humans gained the ability to fly. Their ships got faster and more maneuverable as ours did. We are literally just seeing illusions, many of which we create.

    • Mossy Feathers (They/Them)
      link
      3
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      I’m pretty sure they polled English speakers. As someone who likes speculating about aliens, I was blown away when I discovered how common it is for people to claim to see aliens in countries like Brazil. You just don’t hear about it because most of it is in Portuguese. I wouldn’t be too surprised if most countries had similar levels of “sightings” but cultures are more geared towards people having a “huh, not my problem” kind of response, view it as some kind of religious event, or are too preoccupied with other things to notice anything strange in the sky. The result is that the map would be skewed towards countries with america-like cultures (if we assume it’s a cultural difference, then the US would appear to be the most susceptible to not only attributing unusual properties to strange sky objects, but also be the most likely to speak up about them).

      Edit: oooo, something I just thought about is that telling tall-tales is a popular US past-time. As such, the evidence expected from someone with an extraordinary claim might be lower in the US than in other countries. The result is that people with little-to-no evidence might feel as though they’re more likely to be believed, even if they don’t have any proof.