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.
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.