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.
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.