Most reports you personally hear about come from the US. You won't be able to get an easy overview of the entire dataset by doing a few google searches, you need to dig into this stuff a bit.
I've done the digging, it's US everywhere lol. It's not that they don't exist from other countries, its just that like half of them conservatively speaking are from the US, when the US only has 300 million people or so. You also don't see nearly as many UFO hunters or whatever elsewhere.
There are plenty of prominent cases that resist trivial debunking that are outside of the US, like the Ariel school incident or the Belgian UFO wave for example. I don't think it's particularly significant that most of the reported cases are in the US. The phenomenon is clearly worldwide.
Also if it is ET it would make sense they'd pay special attention to the US considering it's the current hegemon.
The Belgian sighting has no significant differences to many other supposed sightings that have been debunked over and over. Something unusual happens, then it gets some attention, and then a million people get convinced they saw something odd because it's not hard to convince yourself you are seeing something odd by looking at the sky. Hell, a bunch of people often confuse the planet Venus for a UFO, because it is often close to the horizon and really bright. It's really not hard at all to get thousands and thousands of "sightings" after aggressively reporting on supposed UFOs. I remember when I was a little kid and I had seen some alien movie or whatever and in the following days I saw an oddly placed street lamp on some hill which I thought was a UFO, until I saw it again the next day and figured out what it was. The Ariel school thing happened to primary school children. I can't be sure exactly what it was of course but again, children are susceptible to mass hysteria especially in stressful environments and conditions, as well as really honestly believing that something which didn't happen to them actually did. Again, I also remember actually believing I heard reindeers on our roof top as a kid during Christmas. People often assume kids are either lying or saying what they really experienced, however kids can actually really believe something completely made up given the right trigger. It's not something that happens with just aliens. There's lots of cases of mass hysteria in schools for all sorts of stuff, like kids randomly falling down and having seizures for no reason after some kid started it, or satanic panic shit, or ghosts, etc. Google "school mass hysteria", you will find many cases like that (none to do with aliens, but they share similar features).
I don’t think it’s particularly significant that most of the reported cases are in the US.
It's significant because it's mostly a manifestation of certain social attitudes more so than it is something actually weird that people see.
I don't buy the "mass hysteria" hypothesis for Ariel school. Some of the school children have been interviewed as adults and they still stick by the story. They all look like regular neurotypical people that don't seem prone to fantasy, not sure why they would keep sticking to the story it was just a child's imagination going wild.
Some of the school children have been interviewed as adults and they still stick by the story
This is not weird. I kept believing my reindeers on the rooftop story until I realized Santa Clause doesn't exist, which was a few years after.
They all look like regular neurotypical people that don’t seem prone to fantasy, not sure why they would keep sticking to the story it was just a child’s imagination going wild.
Because it was reinforced by other people. You don't have to be neurodivergent. Many if not most perfectly neurotypical people have a false memory or two from childhood, if not more.
They all report it as being a very shocking and profound event in their lives, I just don't think that can really happen while imagining things on a playground.
Do you have any examples of mass hysteria that have such lasting effects?
How lasting it is depends on how they proceeded to cope with it and what the experience was treated as by their surrounding so I can't tell you for sure. However here's one case from South Africa: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277864567_Mass_hysteria_among_South_African_primary_school
Or a famous case in Malaysia: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36069636
And another article talking about this: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/14/was-ripon-school-gripped-by-mass-psychogenic-illness
The problem I have with the "mass hysteria" explanations is you don't really leave room for anything else, it can always serve as the go to explanation without putting too much thought into it. It kinda sounds lazy tbh. You can even say the pilots that are now appearing on the news were suffering from a collective delusion or something. It just completely negates the validity of eye witness testimony by default.
Also most mass hysteria cases have to do with a seemingly mysterious disease spreading and people feeling actual physical pain, not aliens.
Also most mass hysteria cases have to do with a seemingly mysterious disease spreading and people feeling actual physical pain, not aliens.
A lot of them have to do with ghosts or nightmarish visions.
You can even say the pilots that are now appearing on the news were suffering from a collective delusion or something.
Adults can suffer from a collective delusion too but generally adult testimony coming from people who weren't all together in the same location is far more reliable than something like the primary school thing. With adults however something similar happens but much different when you broadcast something like that to a large number of people, because there's always gonna be a few people who will see an airplane and become convinced they had an alien encounter after seeing something on the TV.
I don't get why aliens is the absolute last resort explanation though. Why is it easier to assume most people have hallucination-prone brains than that something weird is actually going on?
It seems to me that the attitude that ET life cannot have been visiting Earth isn't really based on hard science and rationality at all but rather on arbitrary social attitudes or at best really rough guesstimates about the rarity of life in the galaxy (where people usually choose the estimates to get the numbers they wanted to get in the first place)
Why is it easier to assume most people have hallucination-prone brains
Because it's something that is actually known to happen in some schools.
It seems to me that the attitude that ET life cannot have been visiting Earth isn’t really based on hard science and rationality at all
It is. Space is ridiculously sparse, we have never been able to detect any signs of extraterrestrial life or even particularly viable candidates of planets which could conceivably host life in our proximity, and for all we know there is an actual "speed limit" to the universe, so even some sort of ridiculously advanced civilization that can easily achieve speeds close to that of light would require decades or centuries at very best to reach Earth, ridiculous quantities of energy, and to do all that without us ever having picked up any kind of signal from them even only to notify us or whatever is hard to conceive. So it is highly unlikely that it was aliens and not just something related to something else which we already know to happen.
It is. Space is ridiculously sparse, we have never been able to detect any signs of extraterrestrial life or even particularly viable candidates of planets which could conceivably host life in our proximity, and for all we know there is an actual “speed limit” to the universe, so even some sort of ridiculously advanced civilization that can easily achieve speeds close to that of light would require decades or centuries at very best to reach Earth, ridiculous quantities of energy, and to do all that without us ever having picked up any kind of signal from them even only to notify us or whatever is hard to conceive. So it is highly unlikely that it was aliens and not just something related to something else which we already know to happen.
Why do you assume our current understanding of physics is the be all end all? Why couldn't an advanced ET race have FTL travel? We literally have ideas on how FTL could work even with our understanding of physics, and since recently it doesn't even involve exotic forms of energy anymore.
You're just making up assumptions that fit into your narrative. I realize I'm doing the same though, I'm not saying I have it all figured out but neither do you. Why is it not fine to just say "shit's weird, it may even be aliens"
Why do you assume our current understanding of physics is the be all end all?
That's not it. It's just that every time you have to add additional layers of unlikely, and it just keeps begging the question, why don't we pick any of this up? How have we not received either communications signals or the signals from all the exorbitant amounts of energy they probably have to use? Aliens visiting the earth would genuinely be extremely surprising, so of course other explanations in terms of stuff that we already know happens have to first be explored.
Aliens visiting the earth would genuinely be extremely surprising, so of course other explanations in terms of stuff that we already know happens have to first be explored.
I think we're at the point where they've been explored enough and it's time to seriously consider the ET hypothesis.
why don’t we pick any of this up? How have we not received either communications signals or the signals from all the exorbitant amounts of energy they probably have to use?
It could be a type of energy that we don't have the tools to detect yet? After all modern physics postulates stuff like dark matter that we can't even detect, we just think it's there.
I think we’re at the point where they’ve been explored enough and it’s time to seriously consider the ET hypothesis.
Why? Pretty much every time there is supposed to be any kind of hard evidence it turns out to be something mundane. This time was the same, regardless of what media act like.
It could be a type of energy that we don’t have the tools to detect yet?
You can always fall back to "maybe it's something mysterious we don't know" but again this is adding extra layers of unlikely. It would be very weird if first contact was in person rather than radio wave communication, intentional or unintentional.
You can always fall back to “maybe it’s something mysterious we don’t know” but again this is adding extra layers of unlikely.
I think you're the one adding layers of unlikely. The point where prosaic explanations seem unlikelier than genuinely extraordinary explanations is subjective when you think about it. It boils down to your personal intuitions about what could be possible and what couldn't and it's not really based on reason. For me that threshold was crossed when trained fighter pilots started talking about seeing weird craft with no wings or engines doing weird shit.
For me that threshold was crossed when trained fighter pilots started talking about seeing weird craft with no wings or engines doing weird shit.
And yet every single one of the videos they were drawing these conclusions from (remember, the videos are exactly what they were seeing for the most part themselves, is very easily explainable otherwise and has been replicated in terms of things that happen far more routinely, and indeed given the data from the very videos displayed they performed none of the claimed maneuvers. So why would a bunch of stuff that we don't even know if they are remotely possible are the better explanation? The pilots were clearly having a brain fart, remember that point where the pilot said he started going in circles and the craft was mirroring him from the other side of the circle? This sounds like a very weird thing for the aliens to do, but it happens to be exactly what it looks when the object you are circling is sitting mostly still close to the center of the circle, while you think it's actually moving at the opposite side of the circle. And then as he tried to cut through the circle, it zoomed past him, which again sounds exactly like what it should appear like if the object is actually like half as far away from you than you think and you try going directly towards it. Like come on, that's clearly a brain fart. I don't know why they had these brain farts, it might be because they got too excited. But brain farts they were.
And that's where we disagree. I find it extremely unlikely that all those people were having "brain farts" and just decided to join along with some cooky politicians to peddle aliens to get more military money or whatever. That to me sounds way more unlikely than it actually being aliens.
Why would something that actually really happens literally all the time be more unlikely than a whole host of things that no one knows if they are even possible happened lol
Like it's not even debatable whether at least parts of their testimony is just them having a brain fart, the data from their own videos contradicts what they thought they were seeing. People worked out the speed of the object in the GO FAST video based on the angles and distances that the camera displayed on the screen and it was not going very fast at all, it was going at about wind velocity (so probably a balloon or something similar). So we know that at least the parts available to us right now did not show the behavior they thought they saw. So clearly at least parts of the testimony are brain farts.
Why would something that actually really happens literally all the time
No, well trained pilots hallucinating craft of extremely advanced technology doesn't happen literally all the time. Do you realize these people are explicitly trained in recognizing objects in the sky in a blink of an eye? They know how balloons and other fighter jets look like when they're flying.
The videos themselves are the least compelling piece of evidence IMO. Some of the leaked videos are probably mundane, some aren't, they aren't that important (yet) IMO since they really don't show much.
What you have yet to explain is why they're moving forward with this in mainstream media? I find all the usual prosaic explanations (psyop to increase funding etc.) extremely uncompelling and it honestly verges into QAnon wackjob conspiracy theory territory.
They didn't hallucinate, they just thought it was further than it was lol. Their testimonies contradicted the videos.
What you have yet to explain is why they’re moving forward with this in mainstream media? I find all the usual prosaic explanations (psyop to increase funding etc.) extremely uncompelling and it honestly verges into QAnon wackjob conspiracy theory territory.
Why is it so far fetched to you? They've done way more far fetched stuff. There is many reasons why they would do it. Some people have even more mundane explanations, like that the videos were leaked anyways (which they were) so they were like eh whatever, let's release them anyways so people stop bothering us about it and pretend like we are taking this seriously. But the DIA once took Uri Geller's supposed powers seriously and had a whole report about him even though most of his tricks are ridiculously easy to figure out (I don't even know why he got so famous in the first place, like some of his tricks are for babies, he had a trick where he supposedly read your mind and guessed what it was that you had drawn and the whole trick was literally that he was peeking and it was kinda obvious) they're not exactly a paragon of reasonable choices anyways.
Because they don't need to pull this shit, at all. There are way more elegant ways of achieving those goals, ways that they have already used many times with great success. They do not need to invent aliens, the only reason why they'd be doing that is for the fun of it.
It's nothing contrived, they just leaked a couple of videos and said "woah look, weird shit, now give money to investigate". It doesn't come at any cost. They didn't even say they were aliens, other than the pilots of course, because obviously the pilots prefer to be in the spotlight as the people who saw aliens instead of being the people who had a massive brain fart.
Alright man suit yourself, to me personally multiple skilled pilots hallucinating aliens in pretty much the same manner seems way more unlikely than actual aliens but to each their own, we'll see soon enough.
Most reports you personally hear about come from the US. You won't be able to get an easy overview of the entire dataset by doing a few google searches, you need to dig into this stuff a bit.
I've done the digging, it's US everywhere lol. It's not that they don't exist from other countries, its just that like half of them conservatively speaking are from the US, when the US only has 300 million people or so. You also don't see nearly as many UFO hunters or whatever elsewhere.
There are plenty of prominent cases that resist trivial debunking that are outside of the US, like the Ariel school incident or the Belgian UFO wave for example. I don't think it's particularly significant that most of the reported cases are in the US. The phenomenon is clearly worldwide.
Also if it is ET it would make sense they'd pay special attention to the US considering it's the current hegemon.
The Belgian sighting has no significant differences to many other supposed sightings that have been debunked over and over. Something unusual happens, then it gets some attention, and then a million people get convinced they saw something odd because it's not hard to convince yourself you are seeing something odd by looking at the sky. Hell, a bunch of people often confuse the planet Venus for a UFO, because it is often close to the horizon and really bright. It's really not hard at all to get thousands and thousands of "sightings" after aggressively reporting on supposed UFOs. I remember when I was a little kid and I had seen some alien movie or whatever and in the following days I saw an oddly placed street lamp on some hill which I thought was a UFO, until I saw it again the next day and figured out what it was. The Ariel school thing happened to primary school children. I can't be sure exactly what it was of course but again, children are susceptible to mass hysteria especially in stressful environments and conditions, as well as really honestly believing that something which didn't happen to them actually did. Again, I also remember actually believing I heard reindeers on our roof top as a kid during Christmas. People often assume kids are either lying or saying what they really experienced, however kids can actually really believe something completely made up given the right trigger. It's not something that happens with just aliens. There's lots of cases of mass hysteria in schools for all sorts of stuff, like kids randomly falling down and having seizures for no reason after some kid started it, or satanic panic shit, or ghosts, etc. Google "school mass hysteria", you will find many cases like that (none to do with aliens, but they share similar features).
It's significant because it's mostly a manifestation of certain social attitudes more so than it is something actually weird that people see.
I don't buy the "mass hysteria" hypothesis for Ariel school. Some of the school children have been interviewed as adults and they still stick by the story. They all look like regular neurotypical people that don't seem prone to fantasy, not sure why they would keep sticking to the story it was just a child's imagination going wild.
This is not weird. I kept believing my reindeers on the rooftop story until I realized Santa Clause doesn't exist, which was a few years after.
Because it was reinforced by other people. You don't have to be neurodivergent. Many if not most perfectly neurotypical people have a false memory or two from childhood, if not more.
They all report it as being a very shocking and profound event in their lives, I just don't think that can really happen while imagining things on a playground.
Do you have any examples of mass hysteria that have such lasting effects?
How lasting it is depends on how they proceeded to cope with it and what the experience was treated as by their surrounding so I can't tell you for sure. However here's one case from South Africa: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277864567_Mass_hysteria_among_South_African_primary_school
Or a famous case in Malaysia: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36069636
And another article talking about this: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/14/was-ripon-school-gripped-by-mass-psychogenic-illness
The problem I have with the "mass hysteria" explanations is you don't really leave room for anything else, it can always serve as the go to explanation without putting too much thought into it. It kinda sounds lazy tbh. You can even say the pilots that are now appearing on the news were suffering from a collective delusion or something. It just completely negates the validity of eye witness testimony by default.
Also most mass hysteria cases have to do with a seemingly mysterious disease spreading and people feeling actual physical pain, not aliens.
A lot of them have to do with ghosts or nightmarish visions.
Adults can suffer from a collective delusion too but generally adult testimony coming from people who weren't all together in the same location is far more reliable than something like the primary school thing. With adults however something similar happens but much different when you broadcast something like that to a large number of people, because there's always gonna be a few people who will see an airplane and become convinced they had an alien encounter after seeing something on the TV.
I don't get why aliens is the absolute last resort explanation though. Why is it easier to assume most people have hallucination-prone brains than that something weird is actually going on?
It seems to me that the attitude that ET life cannot have been visiting Earth isn't really based on hard science and rationality at all but rather on arbitrary social attitudes or at best really rough guesstimates about the rarity of life in the galaxy (where people usually choose the estimates to get the numbers they wanted to get in the first place)
Because it's something that is actually known to happen in some schools.
It is. Space is ridiculously sparse, we have never been able to detect any signs of extraterrestrial life or even particularly viable candidates of planets which could conceivably host life in our proximity, and for all we know there is an actual "speed limit" to the universe, so even some sort of ridiculously advanced civilization that can easily achieve speeds close to that of light would require decades or centuries at very best to reach Earth, ridiculous quantities of energy, and to do all that without us ever having picked up any kind of signal from them even only to notify us or whatever is hard to conceive. So it is highly unlikely that it was aliens and not just something related to something else which we already know to happen.
Why do you assume our current understanding of physics is the be all end all? Why couldn't an advanced ET race have FTL travel? We literally have ideas on how FTL could work even with our understanding of physics, and since recently it doesn't even involve exotic forms of energy anymore.
You're just making up assumptions that fit into your narrative. I realize I'm doing the same though, I'm not saying I have it all figured out but neither do you. Why is it not fine to just say "shit's weird, it may even be aliens"
That's not it. It's just that every time you have to add additional layers of unlikely, and it just keeps begging the question, why don't we pick any of this up? How have we not received either communications signals or the signals from all the exorbitant amounts of energy they probably have to use? Aliens visiting the earth would genuinely be extremely surprising, so of course other explanations in terms of stuff that we already know happens have to first be explored.
I think we're at the point where they've been explored enough and it's time to seriously consider the ET hypothesis.
It could be a type of energy that we don't have the tools to detect yet? After all modern physics postulates stuff like dark matter that we can't even detect, we just think it's there.
Why? Pretty much every time there is supposed to be any kind of hard evidence it turns out to be something mundane. This time was the same, regardless of what media act like.
You can always fall back to "maybe it's something mysterious we don't know" but again this is adding extra layers of unlikely. It would be very weird if first contact was in person rather than radio wave communication, intentional or unintentional.
I think you're the one adding layers of unlikely. The point where prosaic explanations seem unlikelier than genuinely extraordinary explanations is subjective when you think about it. It boils down to your personal intuitions about what could be possible and what couldn't and it's not really based on reason. For me that threshold was crossed when trained fighter pilots started talking about seeing weird craft with no wings or engines doing weird shit.
And yet every single one of the videos they were drawing these conclusions from (remember, the videos are exactly what they were seeing for the most part themselves, is very easily explainable otherwise and has been replicated in terms of things that happen far more routinely, and indeed given the data from the very videos displayed they performed none of the claimed maneuvers. So why would a bunch of stuff that we don't even know if they are remotely possible are the better explanation? The pilots were clearly having a brain fart, remember that point where the pilot said he started going in circles and the craft was mirroring him from the other side of the circle? This sounds like a very weird thing for the aliens to do, but it happens to be exactly what it looks when the object you are circling is sitting mostly still close to the center of the circle, while you think it's actually moving at the opposite side of the circle. And then as he tried to cut through the circle, it zoomed past him, which again sounds exactly like what it should appear like if the object is actually like half as far away from you than you think and you try going directly towards it. Like come on, that's clearly a brain fart. I don't know why they had these brain farts, it might be because they got too excited. But brain farts they were.
And that's where we disagree. I find it extremely unlikely that all those people were having "brain farts" and just decided to join along with some cooky politicians to peddle aliens to get more military money or whatever. That to me sounds way more unlikely than it actually being aliens.
Why would something that actually really happens literally all the time be more unlikely than a whole host of things that no one knows if they are even possible happened lol
Like it's not even debatable whether at least parts of their testimony is just them having a brain fart, the data from their own videos contradicts what they thought they were seeing. People worked out the speed of the object in the GO FAST video based on the angles and distances that the camera displayed on the screen and it was not going very fast at all, it was going at about wind velocity (so probably a balloon or something similar). So we know that at least the parts available to us right now did not show the behavior they thought they saw. So clearly at least parts of the testimony are brain farts.
No, well trained pilots hallucinating craft of extremely advanced technology doesn't happen literally all the time. Do you realize these people are explicitly trained in recognizing objects in the sky in a blink of an eye? They know how balloons and other fighter jets look like when they're flying.
The videos themselves are the least compelling piece of evidence IMO. Some of the leaked videos are probably mundane, some aren't, they aren't that important (yet) IMO since they really don't show much.
What you have yet to explain is why they're moving forward with this in mainstream media? I find all the usual prosaic explanations (psyop to increase funding etc.) extremely uncompelling and it honestly verges into QAnon wackjob conspiracy theory territory.
They didn't hallucinate, they just thought it was further than it was lol. Their testimonies contradicted the videos.
Why is it so far fetched to you? They've done way more far fetched stuff. There is many reasons why they would do it. Some people have even more mundane explanations, like that the videos were leaked anyways (which they were) so they were like eh whatever, let's release them anyways so people stop bothering us about it and pretend like we are taking this seriously. But the DIA once took Uri Geller's supposed powers seriously and had a whole report about him even though most of his tricks are ridiculously easy to figure out (I don't even know why he got so famous in the first place, like some of his tricks are for babies, he had a trick where he supposedly read your mind and guessed what it was that you had drawn and the whole trick was literally that he was peeking and it was kinda obvious) they're not exactly a paragon of reasonable choices anyways.
Because they don't need to pull this shit, at all. There are way more elegant ways of achieving those goals, ways that they have already used many times with great success. They do not need to invent aliens, the only reason why they'd be doing that is for the fun of it.
It's nothing contrived, they just leaked a couple of videos and said "woah look, weird shit, now give money to investigate". It doesn't come at any cost. They didn't even say they were aliens, other than the pilots of course, because obviously the pilots prefer to be in the spotlight as the people who saw aliens instead of being the people who had a massive brain fart.
Alright man suit yourself, to me personally multiple skilled pilots hallucinating aliens in pretty much the same manner seems way more unlikely than actual aliens but to each their own, we'll see soon enough.