Perhaps people simply aren't prepared to accept the implications of the government lying about this - as well as successfully covering it up - for so long. It's a big impact to a persons world view.

Perhaps people are tired of the same story playing out every few years. Someone got told by somebody else there’s a massive coverup and they definitely have the documents but they’re withholding them for reasons and no we can’t see them but we should absolutely take this story at face value because they have or had a career in the military so are a Very Reliable Person we should take very seriously.

We’re on like season eight or nine of this show and it’s the same plot every time around.

> We’re on like season eight or nine of this show and it’s the same plot every time around.

Until it's not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

People keep saying "If there was such a conspiracy, the government couldn't keep it under wraps, someone would say something".

And then someone says something, and they respond with: "If there was such a conspiracy, the government couldn't keep it under wraps, someone would say something"

You are entirely neglecting the requirement that at the end of the days, these leaks need substance: documents, photo, or other actual evidence besides one guy saying someone else overheard a conversation where another person described our secret ET program.

One crank making headlines every few years with nothing that actually backs up their claims doesn’t cut it. By that metric you might as well believe the hundreds of “leakers” claiming the government is made of lizard people.

> You are entirely neglecting the requirement that at the end of the days, these leaks need substance: documents, photo, or other actual evidence

There is evidence however, things like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bt6_Potk5Q which are becoming more and more common as time goes on. There does seem to be an increasing willingness to disregard evidence all the while demanding more evidence. Recently the pentagon stated they had hundreds of documents/photographs/videos and what has been released publicly does make this appear legitimate.

Is it an alien spaceship? Probably not. Is it an object flying across a warzone that could potentially be a threat of some kind? Quite possibly.

> One crank making headlines every few years

The interesting part of this news is that this person is not "one crank", he's an actual expert in the field employed by organisations to research this exact phenomena. Recently we have had several such experts come along and make these claims. To dismiss that off-hand doesn't seem particularly reasonable these days.

Nobody denies that military sensors have picked up unexplained phenomena. Does that make it evidence of little green men visiting in spacecraft? Not even close.

> The interesting part of this news is that this person is not "one crank", he's an actual expert in the field employed by organisations to research this exact phenomena.

And yet here we are again with this one person’s word and nothing in the way of actual evidence.

At this point the earth is blanketed in radar and high definition cameras. Wake me up when there is evidence past a 240p out of focus video or something odd on an infrared sensor 100km away.

I want to believe. I read every book I could find about UFOs when I was a kid. But here we are 30 years later playing out the same tired storylines over and over again.

I don't see where he is claiming little green men. Is he claiming that?

He claims we have retrieved dead bodies. Nonhuman bodies.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12165669/Military-w...

There are better sources of this than Daily Mail but I am short on time. Just google his name.

So no little green men then?

The most boring thing about the alien versions of the story for non Americans is its always the US military the aliens are buzzing.

Perhaps the aliens are really diligent about avoiding leaving any artefacts behind in the sort of state where some mid ranking official would happily sell the evidence for the price of a new Mercedes or the military would turn up three weeks after international journalists, or the sort of state whose closely-guarded treasure chest full of alien artefacts would have been burst wide open when the government was overthrown.

UFOs are not a US only phenomenon, certainly not a US military only phenomenon. Major events have happened (or been claimed to have happened) in many other countries, including several of the most famous events (Redlesham, Westall, Ariel). There are plenty of reasons to doubt UFOs are real/interesting, but that's just not a valid criticism.

We're not talking about sightings though[1]. We're talking about secret programmes to amass collections of hugely valuable alien detritus wherever they happen to land. One of the key protagonists of this story even insists that 'retrievals of this nature are not limited to the United States'

But for some reason not only have shadowy government agencies been successful at preventing alien artefacts from circulating in India, France, Zimbabwe, the former USSR and multiple regimes whose demise was much more violent than the breakup of the USSR, those states and their descendant states have actually kept a better lid on their programmes!

[1]though I'm not sure your other cited sightings also involving English speakers immersed in Western culture exactly undermines the implication that its a cultural phenomenon driven by US media. But perhaps aliens can't communicate telepathically in Shona or Ndbele...

Is your argument that governments have kept the secret well? That's just not true. There have been claimants from the USSR and France (you can find documents about either on theblackvault). Materials have been claimed to have been recovered by South American people, even recently. China shut down an airport due to a UFO just recently.

The veracity of the above are all suspect, but the fundamental claim that this is something only Americans think about or only happens here, just doesn't reflect reality.

> The veracity of the above are all suspect

That’s GP’s entire point. If this sort of thing were happening to the scale being claimed—worldwide, instead of magically being confined to the US—we’d be swimming in verifiable evidence of alien artifacts being found across the world.

Instead it’s the same grainy, out-of-focus footage, data from sensors out at past their maximum useful range, and substance-free “leaks” with nothing hard to back them up.

What is interesting to me is that I don’t see any angle where the government isn’t lying or not fully divulging what it knows about this topic in some fashion.

Whether aliens, not aliens, our own tech, whatever…there is value to the government creating deception, misinformation, and disinformation.

Why would I care if the government was lying about little green men? Who cares? They’ve been lying since the beginning.

If there was evidence, there’d be evidence.

The interesting thing about this is that there is now evidence (see: Navy videos), and we have also seen what the US government does to people who try to show classified documents as evidence (see: Snowden, Manning, Assange, etc)

Snowden et al looks like counter evidence to me. People who release evidence of secret programs involving UFOs end up doing book tours. People who release evidence of secret spying programs end up in exile.

It's trivially easy to keep covering something up, even with information leaks, if the vast majority of the public disbelieves the entire premise from the get-go.

If there are alien craft flying in a manner even remotely alleged by most UFO people, then we as a civilization are dead. D-E-A-D. Our best hope is compliant slaves or an interesting zoo.

Because it implies essentially effortless arbitrary military and economic exploitation access to our planet. Craft that defy gravity, instantly accelerate in arbitrary directions? Presumably cross light years of distance? They could drop an asteroid on us at will. They could bring our civilization to its knees with simple smart rocks.

Sufficiently advanced technology is magic, and this would indicate that level of advanced technology that we find magical.

Either the civilization is rapacious, or, if they aren't, they will take one look at our history books and realize that we are rapacious.

> If there are alien craft flying in a manner even remotely alleged by most UFO people, then we as a civilization are dead. D-E-A-D. Our best hope is compliant slaves or an interesting zoo.

No, we're not. You clearly haven't read The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-... . One of the startling broad-reaching conclusions you will reach after reading this book is that cooperation even between entities or groups of disparate power is always better in the long run assuming future contact will occur. That last part is the tricky bit, and is why (for example) divorce proceedings are so acrimonious. So sure, if you enslave someone, or a bunch of people, you will get a quick fix. But in the long run you will both gain far more cooperating, because cooperation enables people to contribute more to each other.

IF these beings expect to deal with us for the foreseeable future, THE ONLY wise choice is cooperation. Period. And if that was NOT their goal, then I would submit that we'd already be 1) exploited for all we were worth already and then 2) killed or imprisoned by now.

UFO reports (of the disc-shaped, wingless, noiseless, impossibly-performing standard kind) have been occurring since WW2( "foo fighters"). We're clearly VERY interesting; possibly the newest kids on the block, as it were...

No it's not. Interesting evidence would be seen by tens of millions of people within a day.

That can have many reads. For example from the article:

"The report followed a leak of military footage that showed apparently inexplicable happenings in the sky, while navy pilots testified that they had frequently had encounters with strange craft off the US coast."

I read it as, "We detected several times a military aircraft, that a country expected to be undetectable, flying over our territory, we send you the proof that such plane could have been knocked down; stop doing it" at same time they don't admit such other country violated the territory having to rise up a conflict.

I think the concerning thing is that could well be the case - and there is still a very large number of people in here just saying "nope this guy is crazy".

The group of people who just off-hand deny this is happening is kind of staggering.

Most probably just don't want to accept the US military doesn't have control over their own skies. It's more reassuring to believe this is nonsense.

I'm perfectly prepared to accept that - they're already lying about tons of other stuff. I'm just gonna need something a little more solid than, this guy claimed a few other guys told him some stuff and showed him some papers about how there are totally aliens. Let's see the papers, let's see some close-up high-quality videos of this stuff. Everybody has a HD video camera with 24x7 net connection in their pocket at all times now, how come we haven't seen anything like this yet?

> Read the article.

This (issuing a command to read the article) is even worse than the behavior discussed in guidelines from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".