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Comment by tyleo | Hacker News Reader

UFOs fascinate me. Originally I thought they were pure crack pottery but a friend got me interested with the following argument:

Whatever is responsible for these government videos has to be interesting:

* Unknown natural phenomenon

* Conspiracy with real tech from a government and a coverup

* Conspiracy with fabricated videos from the US government, press releases, and a coverup

* Aliens

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Knowing what little about humanity I do, what would be the end-game of covering up "aliens". What money or power is there in doing so, and does anyone really think that many governments would agree on such a thing?

Covering up state-secret tech, sure; there's obvious reasons for that.

It is interesting that the shape/manner/physical characteristics of UFOs seem to gel with whatever the current time's zeitgeist is for the time they've been reported. Aliens must have a human fashion sense.

I don’t know that a government would cover it up if it were aliens. I think the other possibilities are more likely.

If you're studying alien tech for the purposes of weaponizing it, you wouldn't want someone else to know about it let alone study it, thus covering it up makes sense. A good coverup where no information leaks would be best, the second best is to cover it up with a false explanation of "not aliens" and "nothing interesting here" as to dissuade anyone else of investigating/studying the phenomenon.

Again, I don't think this is likely, but here's an angle to argue for the cover up.

The US used to be a much more religious country that it is today. The existence of aliens has a lot of implications for religion. It could be that when the cover up started, the people in power didn't want to deal with those implications and especially didn't want a lot of disaffected formerly religious people (don't forget that part of religion is control over the populace). So they covered it up. Once the cover up starts it has momentum and I can see it continuing past the time the original reason is relevant.

Sorry to drift off topic, but this comes across as a wildly uninformed description of religion; a strawman.

I disagree. The idea that organized religions exist primarily as a means of societal control is well-supported by even the most basic (let alone thorough) of examinations of world history and contemporary society.

Actually, the opposite is true: an objective examination of both world history and contemporary society produces a pretty favorable view towards religion in terms of net positive effects.

It is certainly true that a lot of bad has been done in the name of religion*, and that there are some number of close-minded religious nutter types that make the news but relative to the totals these are both minorities. And as for the idea about societal control, the notion that it is a 'primary' reason for their existence is unfounded.

* People who seek and wield power will use whatever tool they can get their hands on; if religion plays a large role in a society, then obviously that is a tool that certain people will attempt to use. Removing religion from the equation doesn't make the problem go away - those same people will just find different tools to use. Government suppression of religious freedom/diversity has played a large role in this too.

Edit: a few quick references out of many. Sociologists have long been aware of positive impacts of religion (e.g. https://www.pewforum.org/2016/04/12/religion-in-everyday-lif...) for individuals and "local" societies, but even at the macroeconomic level there is strong evidence that religion has aided economic development, globalism, etc.:

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/4/1/145/htm http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11... https://www.hoover.org/research/religion-and-economic-develo...

> an objective examination of both world history and contemporary society produces a pretty favorable view towards religion in terms of net positive effects.

That is not mutually exclusive with the idea of organized religion being a tool of societal control. Sometimes that societal control happens to have good (or at least less bad) results.

> And as for the idea about societal control, the notion that it is a 'primary' reason for their existence is unfounded.

There's a reason why I'm specifying "organized" in "organized religion". The primary reason to organize a religion - rather than, say, allowing practitioners to autonomously determine for themselves their connection with the universe around them and how to interpret and reason about said connection - is precisely to constrain how practitioners reason about that connection. The very concepts of "blasphemy", "infidelity", "apostasy", "hereticism", etc. all strongly imply a desire for control. And given that the notion of a separation of church and state is pretty recent from a historical standpoint, it's pretty patently obvious where this leads for societies on local, regional, and national stages alike.

That is:

> People who seek and wield power will use whatever tool they can get their hands on; if religion plays a large role in a society, then obviously that is a tool that certain people will attempt to use.

Religion - particularly the organized variety - has historically played a large role in the overwhelmingly vast majority of societes. In the majority of those societies, said role was by government fiat. Consequently:

> Removing religion from the equation doesn't make the problem go away - those same people will just find different tools to use.

Right, but that doesn't change the reality that organized religion is such a tool, by design per its very nature of being organized.

I had not intended my comment as an attack on religion nor was I making a value judgment about the net effect of religion on humanity. Nor did I intend to imply that exerting control over others is the total or even main point behind religion. Finally I wasn't trying to supply a complete description of religion, just referencing one facet of it.

> Knowing what little about humanity I do, what would be the end-game of covering up "aliens".

"My fellow Americans... I'm sure you've heard rumors of what I am about to say, but I am here as your President to set the record straight about what we do and do not know. What we do know is that there are structured technological craft operating in our airspace that we have reason to believe are not of human construction or operation. What we don't know is... everything else. Where are they from? Who is operating them? What is their intention? Are they friendly or hostile? How long have they been here? Are they simply observing or are they interacting with us? Are any of the stories of extraterrestrial abductions or influence of history valid? ... We also do not have control of our airspace, and the technology of the visitors is apparently so advanced that we have no hope of interfering with their activities regardless of what they are..."

Yeah, they're totally gonna give that speech. Better have cops in riot gear deployed ahead of time.

And you think every gov't in the world is conspiring to withhold this riot-inducing information? Or that ONLY <whatever country you live in> has been visited by something from another planet?

Neither seems even remotely possible.

I was just responding in the abstract to the parent's assertion that there'd be no point in keeping such a thing secret. I can see lots of reasons governments would want to keep it secret. Could they? Probably not for very long. They'd eventually be dragged into divulging by someone else divulging or a huge data leak.

> Knowing what little about humanity I do, what would be the end-game of covering up "aliens".

I think it's possible the government practically can't reveal information about extraterrestrials, supernatural phenomenon, or really anything that's within the realm of incredible.

The reason being - there will be a potentially large amount of people that will not believe what the government reveals or that they're being honest about their revelations.

You only have to see something like QAnon or the Russiagate stuff to see that a large segment of people across the political spectrum creates vast narratives founded in distrust of whatever is relatively credible and apparent.

So if the government were to say "we're aware of phenomenon that we cannot explain and it seems to be characteristic of some form of intelligence," you'd have many who would start arguing that the government is colluding with aliens or something. It could be destabilizing to society.

But ALL governments? Does one country have some lock on UFO data?

Or they are real and nobody including 'the governement' (pls be aware the US is just a small part of the world) has a rational explanation (for now).

The U in UFO is for 'Unidentified'. It does not mean 'Alien'.

I edited my post to clarify

Or more precisely, “The A in UFO is for Aliens”.

It just dawned on me that this is the case for the expanded form of that initialism, too.

Also:

* birds

* (weather) balloons

* camera artifacts

* other privately owned airborne objects

Not everything is a conspiracy.

Have you listened to any accounts, especially from the military folks who recorded some of the content?

Birds, balloons, known airborne objects don’t travel at the speeds of military vehicles which were following.

I’d consider camera artifacts to be a phenomenon. It would still be interesting that a previously unknown artifact presents in certain conditions that mainly occur on military equipment.

UFOs are probably a mixture of different phenomena. A couple of reports are quite difficult to explain. Unexplained weather phenomena doesn't sound like such a far-fetched theory to me.

Or "swamp gas", per MIB.

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