It doesn’t really matter, any motivations from “someone wants to cause chaos” to “someone is literally crazy” to “the CIA is playing an elaborate distraction game as part of some other plan” are by definition more plausible than something like alien crafts traversing interstellar space unobserved and coming to spy on us and nothing else. Anything that only involves humans and doesn’t require new undiscovered laws of physics to be realistic wins the Bayes lottery by orders of magnitude.
Right now the important distinction is “Is there an explanation that warrants further investigation” or “Is there no explanation that warrants further investigation”. It’s not “Are there aliens or not”.
From the point of view of a decision maker in the government, sure, I agree. From my viewpoint it makes little difference; if it’s just some random crazy guy, it’s not worth explaining, and if it’s a conspiracy of some sort to forge this information for NatSec purposes, then odds are the committee would end up bending over to it or being fooled as well. Either way, I’m not going to know anything for sure until there’s some actual disclosure of some actual things that can’t be explained in any other ways than aliens or an equally extraordinary phenomenon. Until then, it’s a non-issue for me; it’s neither actionable nor verifiable, so ignoring it makes perfect sense.
I’m not in the US so this doesn’t really apply to me, but in general, insofar as public pressure goes, there’s probably a dozen more important issues to spend that political capital on than UFOs. Again, I’ll consider it important if there’s ever any independent evidence that this is a thing. Absent that, I accept the risk that I may indeed be ignoring the most important and perfect cover-up in history, but my bet is still solidly on it being a nothingburger.
It doesn’t really matter, any motivations from “someone wants to cause chaos” to “someone is literally crazy” to “the CIA is playing an elaborate distraction game as part of some other plan” are by definition more plausible than something like alien crafts traversing interstellar space unobserved and coming to spy on us and nothing else. Anything that only involves humans and doesn’t require new undiscovered laws of physics to be realistic wins the Bayes lottery by orders of magnitude.
Right now the important distinction is “Is there an explanation that warrants further investigation” or “Is there no explanation that warrants further investigation”. It’s not “Are there aliens or not”.
From the point of view of a decision maker in the government, sure, I agree. From my viewpoint it makes little difference; if it’s just some random crazy guy, it’s not worth explaining, and if it’s a conspiracy of some sort to forge this information for NatSec purposes, then odds are the committee would end up bending over to it or being fooled as well. Either way, I’m not going to know anything for sure until there’s some actual disclosure of some actual things that can’t be explained in any other ways than aliens or an equally extraordinary phenomenon. Until then, it’s a non-issue for me; it’s neither actionable nor verifiable, so ignoring it makes perfect sense.
I think that public pressure has an effect on Congress and the depth to which it investigates issues.
Congressmen who drive such inquiries care about what their voters and the media think about them pursuing it.
I’m not in the US so this doesn’t really apply to me, but in general, insofar as public pressure goes, there’s probably a dozen more important issues to spend that political capital on than UFOs. Again, I’ll consider it important if there’s ever any independent evidence that this is a thing. Absent that, I accept the risk that I may indeed be ignoring the most important and perfect cover-up in history, but my bet is still solidly on it being a nothingburger.