No it's really not fantastical. We have no physical evidence of extraterrestrials but we do have physical evidence that the CIA engages in sometimes ridiculous operations to psychologically manipulate people. I mean if you told someone the CIA did mind control experiments in the 60s they'd think your nuts. But we know today with certainty they did, often with tragic consequence.

So, the bayesian priors, given that in the course of humanity or even prehistorically there is no certain evidence of aliens, and plenty of evidence of weirdo government manipulation and innumerable examples of propaganda, should be skewed in the favor of any new fantastical governmental claim to be yet another silly operation by some three letter agency.

Until someone procures a body or craft of certain non human origin, this is the only reasonable course of action.

> We have no physical evidence of extraterrestrials but we do have physical evidence that the CIA engages in sometimes ridiculous operations to psychologically manipulate people

That’s true. And I would even say a CIA psyop is more likely than aliens. But its still purely speculative.

Right, and evidence free indulgences into fan fiction speculation about the CIA etc etc are unnecessary detours.

If you define aliens as a long separated branch on the tree of life with significantly more advanced technology, then alien encounters are more common in history (hawai’i in 1790’s being most recent i can think of).

So mathematically its rare, but perhaps an experience of 1% of societies . And perhaps strongly correlated with one branch undergoing a rapid technological advance.

i think it’s perfectly rationale and not fantastical, as long as its kept in mind that its a low probability event.

Yes, it really is fantastical. Six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon style associations to unrelated historical events, just to motivate fan fiction writing about psyops is not healthy engagement with the state of reported evidence, much less the only reasonable course of action. I can think of another, refraining from entertaining in elaborate explanations born of speculation unsupported by evidence. Boom, done.

The fanfiction writing serves to validate the manner of thinking that would motivate people to believe the most extreme possible interpretation of this reporting, effectively extending a vote of approval toward people inclined to look at this and put themselves in a headspace of entertaining speculative beliefs without evidence.

I don't think it's charitable or polite to refer to GP's argument as fan fiction. They're making a genuine argument about what they think could have happened, not writing a made-up story, regardless of how unlikely you think their psy-op hypothesis is.

A psyop doesn’t have to be a super advanced operation. It could be some low effort opportunistic thing that helps objectives.

The “declassified” UAP videos so far are rote footage containing easily debunked garbage. Why would the military release lens flare videos and claim they’re UAP? They could be blithering idiots not knowing they’re looking at lens flare, which is probably less likely than knowing it’s BS and claiming it’s UAP with some ulterior motive. So, psyop.

> The “declassified” UAP videos so far are rote footage containing easily debunked garbage. Why would the military release lens flare videos and claim they’re UAP? They could be blithering idiots not knowing they’re looking at lens flare, which is probably less likely than knowing it’s BS and claiming it’s UAP with some ulterior motive. So, psyop.

A more mundane possibility: Someone thought, "Hey, you know, if there are aliens doing thing secretly, we'd want to know about it, right? And also, there are always going to be these stories, and if our answer is always, 'No that's probably lens flare', people are going to think we're trying to cover something up. So how about we just make a policy, that any time someone has unexplained phenomena, we log it properly? Either we'll get a long track record of nothing-burgers, or we'll actually find something. Or, maybe we'll have 50 years of nothing-burgers, followed by something actually different, and we'll have a solid 'baseline' from which to look into the new phenomenon."

That makes sense, but it’s pretty insidious to release lens flare videos as UAP knowing they’re lens flare. Either they’re not actually analyzing these videos or they’re going pretty far into psyop land with this mundane operation.

Do you really put aliens and psyops in the same league of fantastical speculation? One is advanced beings from light years away or other dimensions, and the other is military information campaigns for which there is plenty of precedent.