Aliens are an extraordinary claim, we need to check out a lot of things before we start considering them. Take the "life on Venus" recent claim. There was a lot of work done to even consider it. They used results from several observatories, analyzed every known explanations to rule them out one after the other, and even now they still consider it unlikely compared to other currently unknown chemistry. So if you see a scientist and tell him, I saw a flying saucer, it was aliens, he will laugh at you because there are thousands of other explanations to look for first.
On the other hand "mass hysteria" is also a lousy explanation. In reality, I think they are usually optical illusions. For example, the moon may appear like something else in unusual atmospheric conditions, and if you cross-reference the position of the moon with some UFO sightings, you get a lot of correlations. Other cases include small, close objects like insects appear like large, fast objects, this is common among pilots who are trained to look for other planes. There are also many psychological effects that aren't hysteria, for example it is common for people to "remember" things that never happened, which is also a big problem in a court of law: our memories are unreliable. Add to that defective equipment, pranks, etc... and you can probably cover most of the sightings.
Then there is a small minority of true mass hysteria, secret programs, unexplained physical phenomena, etc... and only then you can start to consider aliens.
And to make thing worse, more often than not, there is very little data.
With this phenomenon however, it’s like the polar opposite. Nobody wants to associate themselves with it, so even if there is something worth studying, we’re not studying it.
Technically, you can become a UFO if you turn off your transponder. You are flying AND you are not broadcasting your identity.
I'll show myself out.
After seeing the declassified Navy videos [0] I'm not sure how much more extraordinary evidence we can get.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/pentagon-declassifies-ufo-vi...
Mick West simply disregards all of this and in an email I wrote to him even claims that the weeks of incidents previous to the video being captured were "separate" events from the video because they didn't concretely, confirmably show the same thing.... What? An absurd conclusion.
Debunking with a critical eye is good and necessary but sometimes one gets the feeling that certain internet debunkers feel a need to debunk at all costs because that's their label, even if their own "rational" interpretations make leaps of logic much worse than simply admitting that something inexplicable was observed.
If these things really do behave in the way he’s described, ET or not it suggests a fundamental leap in technology - it baffles me that there isn’t more interest.
You may be surprised at how many people you know have had experiences of their own, or know someone close who has, but don’t talk about it for fear of judgement.
For all the hundreds of thousands of anecdotal reports that exist, and documented cases involving hundreds of witnesses, there is so little research into the phenomenon. Most of it is dismissed as mass hysteria, rather than investigated to determine if that assumption is true.
That said, it’s not exactly a phenomenon that can easily be studied - the results are not repeatable. As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I think we need to stop calling it a conspiracy theory, and instead call it just a theory. Remember there was a time when it was considered a conspiracy to say the the earth revolves around the sun.