• Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works
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    16 hours ago

    I think the US government actively encouraged the UFO craze, because it drew attention away from the experimental aircraft they were testing, like the SR-71 blackbird.

    • mriswith@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      They’ve admitted that.

      Someone at Pentagon was recently investigating UFO conspiracies and found that several kept looping back to them. And they realized that at least one was directly planted by themselves during the cold war to confuse the USSR about what weapons were real or not.

    • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      15 hours ago

      That honestly wouldn’t surprise me tbh. And area 51 being great conditions for testing aircraft: empty space, clear skies, easier to recover parts and people from than the ocean, very little human habitation.

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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        16 hours ago

        I absolutely think the government has deliberately spread various conspiracy theories at different points to cover up specific things they were doing.

        “Chemtrails,” for example, became a thing with a bunch of wild accessory claims that were obviously wrong, at a time when people were discovering that the US government had done biological weapons testing by dropping viruses from airplanes over cities and in some cases hurt random people by doing it. If there’s a nutty conspiracy theory out there that sounds a lot like what actually happened, it makes it harder for people to talk about what actually happened without also sounding crazy.