by Kathdys » Sat Dec 06, 2014 8:53 pm
The 'UFO' thing really got off the ground (hurr hurr) when an American experimental aircraft crashed, and a local press officer (or similar) made the poor decision of explaining it away as a UFO. The 'weather balloon' excuse was the official one, created later to cover it up. It really was an man-made experimental aircraft that the armed forces could not release information about, so there really was a big cover up.
Unfortunately, the idea was planted that they were covering up something much more exotic--something that they probably wouldn't have covered up, or perhaps even been able to, if it had really crashed there. People started making false reports, inside the military, in the area, anywhere that they heard about this, even falsifying their own memories to include things they only heard about years after the fact, for decades after the event. The stories have changed over time to include corrections and added complexities, to make them seem more believable and scientific. You won't find people who haven't heard about UFOs talking about UFO sightings (except if you strain really hard to explain sightings of unusual lights and colours as UFOs, despite how many other phenomenon, natural and artificial, can cause these), and I think it'd be awfully coincidental if the only people who have alien encounters are people who dream about aliens.
Sure, that can be justified by alien mind-reading or something, but then that doesn't explain all the encounters where these people seem to only coincidentally encounter the aliens, not where the aliens purposefully came there to interact with them. Then you can also explain this as the aliens only allowing themselves to be caught in the act by those whose credibility is already damaged, but if you go that far, you have to realize that people whose credibility is already damaged probably aren't reliable witnesses in the first place. This justification makes about as much sense as 'poison isn't really dangerous, it's just when people eat poison they get hit with an invisible radiation from outer space meant to stop us from eating things that an alien supercomputer doesn't want us to eat'. (I hope I didn't just start a new conspiracy theory... this is pretty much how it happens.)
We don't have solid evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence--the SETI program is still on, among other things, and has a pretty substantial budget--but we do have a lot of research into culture-bound syndromes and the way human memory works. It's just as easy to use our scientific knowledge to explain away this idea of extraterrestrial life visiting the Great Plains as it is to speculate about things beyond our ken that could hypothetically explain the imagined phenomenon. I think that's a pretty solid indication that nothing supernormal is going on, but your mileage may vary.
We've debunked many similar myths before--zombies, fan death, etc.; North Americans aren't immune to coming up with our own scary hysterical mythology, or believing in it, or even taking it seriously into government policy. I don't think this is a hoax, but sadly, there is nothing implausible about hundreds of people deluding themselves into believing something, if they really want it to be true. And you heard the man--he really wants it to be true, it could mean unlimited clean energy and world peace, and anti-gravity technology, all for the price of making noise in public!
It's not that easy, unfortunately. No matter how much we convince ourselves, we're never going to learn how to build a magical flying saucer just by yelling at the people who gave us the SR-71 Blackbird to disclose everything they know. They're very sorry, but even they have a limited capacity to produce unmitigated, miraculous technology, and while they're keeping a lot of amazing secrets, none of them come close to the sheer scale of the those suggested in this conference--nobody can solve all the world's biggest problems just by releasing information.
@Borka: That explains a lot...