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Comment by uhtred | Hacker News Reader

It does seem odd that people would put their reputation on the line by making up a story about seeing a UFO.

For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/03/opinion/night-i-saw-u...

> It does seem odd that people would put their reputation on the line by making up a story about seeing a UFO.

Why does this seem odd? People embellish or make shit up all the time. Trump loved to tell transparently goofy "sir" stories (https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/sir-trump-telltale-w...).

"But no genre of Trump story is more reliably sir-heavy than his collection of suspiciously similar tales about macho men breaking into tears of gratitude in his presence."

> For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly...

Might not be a lie. False memories exist, and misidentifying things in the sky at night is hardly uncommon. I was once in the Adirondacks and observed what could only be described as a UFO - a bright, silent, slow moving light in the sky - until a minute or two later that C-5 flew loudly over the lake we were staying in, presumably to land at Fort Drum. Size, shape, speed, etc. were all impossible to accurately identify.

Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example personally.

The guy who wrote this article in the Boston Globe is "a professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College" - seems like it wouldn't be worth him making this up.

And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying?

> Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example personally.

He's a perfect example of how not everyone cares about getting caught lying.

> And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying?

Shit, it could've been a realistic dream; I've had dreams I was certain were real. Or, more mundanely, maybe it was a helicopter with a searchlight.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/07/30/206946740/m...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopp%E2%80%93Etchells_effect

hmm, he does say he was camping on a beach in Plymouth, MA. On the map I see a municipal airport not far inland and a bit to the south a coast guard air base. I could imagine a coast guard helicopter out patrolling the coastline taking a closer look at someone on the beach at 2am.

I can't read the full Boston Globe article due to the paywall and offer no opinion on the author's state of mind, but if you assume some small percent of outwardly functional people have "eccentric" personalities, it would not be surprising that you would occasionally hear about a college professor doing something eccentric. Why is any further explanation needed than "some humans have quirky personalities and do quirky things..."

It's not a lie if the author believes that it's true. People are way too trusting of their senses and memories when both have been shown to be extremely fallible under numerous different circumstances. Remember how suggestible victims had been convinced that they participated in satanic sex rituals during the satanic panic[1]? Why is it out of the realm of possibility that the author is recounting a particularly vivid dream or hallucination that became more "real" the more he thought about it?

Then consider how closely the form of alien sightings matches depictions in popular media. In the 60 it's "little green men", in the 90s it's "greys". Either we have waves of different aliens visiting us, or people are having experiences they can't rationally explain and their brain is filling in the gaps with stuff they've seen in the media.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers

Edit: Another question to ponder: The chances of someone having a camera on them at any given moment is now approaching 100%, but the volume of convincing footage of UFO/alien sighting is as small as it was in 1990. Are people just not filming this stuff for some reason or are the aliens getting sneakier?

I agree that memories are not always reliable but I personally find it to be with smaller less significant details about a larger event. So I could believe that the author perhaps misremembers colors or sounds or size to some extent- but to have a completely false memory of an entire event? I suppose a helicopter could have hovered over him and trained a search light on him- but to remember it years later as a UFO, I don't know.

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