https://nitter.net/smashbaals/status/1666562294719950849#m

Damn near every tweet this bozo makes could be a dunk tank post, but what I like about this is that it’s a reminder that tens of millions of Americans believe there are actually these little demons who go around doing everything from flying spaceships to tempting Rachel in Jacksonville to go ahead and eat another Oreo.

As someone who grew up in the evangelical community in the US, the belief that “aliens are demons actually” was shockingly common.

    • AcidSmiley [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Not realy, it leaves out all the English speakers in Africa, the Carribean or India, Australia is way too dim and somehow it adds the Netherlands as the global UFO sighting epicenter. It doesn't match population densities, either. At first i thought it was protestant mayos, but then it would have to light up Scandinavia and northern Germany more.

    • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      :british-maw: Oi, mate! You got a loicense for that triangle with a square arse that acts as a landing pad for alien spaceships? :daniel-jackson-shining:

    • DoubleShot [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      These are the kind of people who think Catholics aren’t “real Christians”.

      • Dolores [love/loves]
        ·
        2 years ago

        on that old fashioned prot shit callin Catholics pagan for human sacrifice (transubstantiation) and idol worship (icons)

      • Fuckass
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        deleted by creator

    • DoubleShot [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      I have heard Evangelicals say with a straight face that Catholicism is basically paganism…

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
    ·
    2 years ago

    yeah, America, literally the great Satan, the domain of Mammon, is obviously the most Christian place on earth because we see lights in the sky a lot. Latin America all worship demons (aka the pope)(aka aliens).

  • barrbaric [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Unrelated but that username has made me think: cock and Baal torture

      • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        This seems obvious that I'm guessing the visualization was generated to show pitfalls in a data mining course lol.

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I don't understand why people "report" these. They're calling the cops because they saw something in the sky they didn't recognise? Losers.

    • TheCaconym [any]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      This map comes from a company called ESRI, which used data from NUFORC, not cops.

      So people in this case are instead helpfully reporting potential occurrences of an interesting phenomenon to a non-profit, not calling the cops.

      This also most likely explains why almost all of the reports are from the US or the UK; this is not a map of "UFO reports", this is a map of "UFO reports made to a specific US organization". There are many others, including local ones in non-English speaking countries.

    • Fuckass
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      deleted by creator

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    like 20 years ago i used to live in a house with 3 roommates, and one of my roommates used to buy weed off this guy 'Jerry'. he met jerry in a used bookstore in a woo woo part of town. jerry was like mid 50s and would hangout for a while telling my roommate about how aliens are real, but also they are angels, actually. he even loaned him a huge (several hundred page, hard cover) reference book that had "information" about every angel's name "house/order/charge/purpose" etc.

    jerry was a very intense individual. like one of those guys who makes and maintains eye contact too much, like a car salesman or a cult leader. i would just stay in my room when jerry came over.

    i feel like this guy and jerry should be forced to hang out and be observed.

    • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      he even loaned him a huge (several hundred page, hard cover) reference book that had “information” about every angel’s name “house/order/charge/purpose” etc.

      I actually have something like this, an encyclopedia of spirits. It's very interesting stuff, like the name implies it's just got the names of spirits/gods/holy figures from most of the major/minor faiths and religions through written history.

        • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          No, it's a non-denominational work; like 2,000 pages of demons, fae creatures, spirits, transcendant individuals, saints, angels, gods and goddesses, all sorts of stuff. I have piles of boxes of books at home, I will try and dig it out and share the title/author after work.

          E) It was Encyclopedia of Spirits: The Ultimate Guide to the Magic of Fairies, Genies, Demons, Ghosts, Gods & Goddesses by Coast to Coast AM frequent guest Judika Illes

          • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Ah, cool. Davidson's work was mostly Qabalah, and it went along pretty well as a quick reference alongside those Llewellyn Press Enochian ceremonial magick books that Denning and Phillips were putting out back in the 80s and 90s.

    • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      When I was much, much younger, I went through a bit of a woo shit phase. This woo shit phase included picking up a book on reiki healing, in which the author asserts that the Hindu gods were in fact aliens and made contact with early humans, in addition to imparting their innate psychic abilities to said hominids. Shortly after thumbing through this book, I discussed it with someone in a Wicca/Neopaganism chat room (on Yahoo Chat, no less) who was extremely offended that I used the word "aliens."

      Edit: The same person tried to perform a long-distance reiki healing on me via the internet (literally by holding our hands up against our monitors to establish a "connection"). To be fair, I had strep, was a broke college student, and I live in Burgerland, so it was worth a shot.

      • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        silly terran, made from mud with a mind of dusty saltwater. you cannot possibly comprehend the cosmic consciousness of a starseed. i personally received the True Knowledge from a starseed named Kevin in a UFO camoflauged to look like a 1988 Ford Econoline in the parking lot by the Daytona Beach pier, before his ship departed for Jacksonville.

        i grew up in a high populated part of the country with abysmal mental health services and no social safety net. i also had a woo phase for a while in early adulthood... there's something alluring and almost prestigious about so-called traditional knowledge when the institutions of modernity are wretchedly failing. at my most disbelief-suspending times, it felt like i couldn't go a week without running into someone who was peddling some wildly off the rails conspiratorial cosmology. i had long hair and was polite/chill. I liked hanging out in low traffic bookstores and reading weird shit for free, which I guess is something I have in common with people on the fringe. so i guess i seemed approachable to someone with orders from the mothership. better me than someone who is going to prey on them, i guess?

        i've been around woo and tolerant towards it for so long, but in the last decade or so as i settled into leftism, it's started to bother me. the grifting of desperate people generally, but also way focusing on individualized treatment serves to distract people from collective action to restore, improve, reform institutions to serve us. not to mention, some of the woo people i knew 10-20 years ago turned into massive reactionaries and anti-vax Q brains. it's upsetting if i think about it too much, so i tend to just make jokes about the brain worms.

    • Sen_Jen [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Someone should give Jerry LSD and make him watch all of Evangelion

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    These neo-medieval mindset groypers need to go back to finding giants in the clouds or some shit

    Leave sci-fi to us 21st century folk

  • Bjork_shhh [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    As we all know, Catholics and Protestant who worship the satanic "invisible hand of the free market" are totally not about ignoring God in favor of human created pagan idols

  • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Latin America Christianity has a little too much melanin I guess.

    If anything, this map would indicate the opposite. Most of the world isn't as alienated from the divine, therefore when they encounter a demon they know what it is.

    In the Anglo world (which is what this map really highlights), where capitalism is the oldest and most intense, when people see a demon they don't recognize it and make up bullshit about aliens.

  • buh [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Aliens are demons and anglos happen to be the most evil people on earth

  • MF_COOM [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    IDK I think that tweet is hilarious, couldn't put it better :chefs-kiss:

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Super Smash Ba'als would be dope af

    Also, I hate living in a country full of so many delusional fanatics.

    Also, believing that Satan can give people magic powers in defiance of god is heresy. :vaticanburning: