• Alto@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    IIRC this was a study (survey?) done by a American company.

    There are tons of UFO sighting in plenty of non-NA or EU countries such as Brazil and South Africa

    • Here_in_Malaysia@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I’d like to add that for many countries like mine, a UFO sighting wouldn’t even register as “unidentified” or having an outer space origin. The locals would attribute it to something religious instead.

      • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Berrrrr. VWOOP! widdle widdle, shooom. Pew, pew, pew. Buh luh luh luh luh luh. So sayeth the lord. Amen.

        And now we paint ourselves green and dance in his shiny circular beamy holy goodness.

        You ain’t gotta give, but I’m taking donations. If your neighbor don’t drop a dollarydoo in the plate, don’t judge him too harshly.

    • quicksand@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I was wondering why the sightings were dominated by English speaking countries, this may be the reason. Thanks.

    • Mr_Blott@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      If you think the most English speakers live in the US and UK I’ve got some very surprising news for you

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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        11 months ago

        Most native speakers live in the U.S. and the UK based on population numbers. We’re talking over 400 million native speakers.

        But as far non-native speakers, Google tells me that’s India. But most English speakers in India don’t speak it as their first language. They learned it in school, they didn’t grow up speaking it at home.

    • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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      11 months ago

      That’s because the source of the data is an English website which collected only English reports.

        • lasagna@programming.dev
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          11 months ago

          How many people eat food because they know they need it vs because they just want it. I think chronic boredom is like that but worse and far more subtle. It amplifies a lot of our other issues, such as adhd and obesity.

          And I don’t think you need to be bored to enjoy good entertainment. Not to mention the industry runs on greed mostly. It would be in their interest that people didn’t find the problem as that could lead to people finding a cure. How would e.g. Netflix keep profiting from producing such poor content? How about those who profit so much from feeding ads to our brain dead states?

  • dunestorm@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    This is my biggest problem with believing anything alien related; how come all of the video evidence is taken on a phone camera from 2001, and the fact basically all sightings happen in the US?

    The people making this shit up have to try harder than that!

    • Calatia@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      There’s a somewhat rational theory that Roswell happened because it was the site of the nuclear bomb testings and aliens “only try to contact civs that are at splitting the atom tech level”.

      It has some merit to it, but yeah, look at that map. Hardly convincing when looking at the reported sightings.

  • Archmage Azor@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I think its a mix of idiots everywhere, and the government secretly testing prototype aircraft. The idiots see the prototype aircraft, don’t recognize it, and immediately go “eyljuhns!”

  • mwguy@infosec.pub
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    11 months ago

    Or more accurately, total classified air flights. There’s a reason so many reports happen near US military facilities.

  • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de
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    11 months ago

    This looks more like a map of any English speaking news source I would see online. I mean I see us politics and us topics on lemmy and my local newspaper all the time, but hardly ever hear anything from far away places like Ghana, Romania, south America, middle east or south east asia unless in specifically look for it on some lesser known sites.

    • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      The official language of Ghana is English. They have plenty of news online, you just don’t know about it.

      It’s not English that aliens are attracted to, we are imagining them. UFOs appeared when humans gained the ability to fly. Their ships got faster and more maneuverable as ours did. We are literally just seeing illusions, many of which we create.

    • Mossy Feathers (They/Them)@pawb.social
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      11 months ago

      I’m pretty sure they polled English speakers. As someone who likes speculating about aliens, I was blown away when I discovered how common it is for people to claim to see aliens in countries like Brazil. You just don’t hear about it because most of it is in Portuguese. I wouldn’t be too surprised if most countries had similar levels of “sightings” but cultures are more geared towards people having a “huh, not my problem” kind of response, view it as some kind of religious event, or are too preoccupied with other things to notice anything strange in the sky. The result is that the map would be skewed towards countries with america-like cultures (if we assume it’s a cultural difference, then the US would appear to be the most susceptible to not only attributing unusual properties to strange sky objects, but also be the most likely to speak up about them).

  • Chadarius@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    That is because people are morons and don’t know how cameras work. Even the military thinks things like low flying geese are some how aliens, when clearly their evidence is to the contrary. I am not saying that there aren’t aliens. They probably do exist, but the evidence we keep getting shown for it is laughable.

  • cc8@infosec.pub
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    11 months ago

    Americans trying to explain why the map looks like this Image

        • TheCraiggers@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          No, but in this case it’s not just population. If some potato farmer in northern Asia sees a UFO (especially before the proliferation of smartphones), how would it be reported and appear on this map? Lots of other reports come from pilots and such and again, far different distribution between continents.

  • conrad82@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    When the first dinosaur bone was discovered, noone had heard about it before and people believed that bones they found before were from some animals

    After people knew about dinosaurs they started finding them other places in the world at a rapid pace. Many people thought it was all a hoax

    So you know, unless you know about them you don’t know what to report. And americans think most about aliens I guess.

    That being said, probably there aren’t secret aliens around. probably 🫣

    • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      So… what were they mistaking the aliens for?

      I mean, the actual verified “alien craft” in America is actually more of a “not sure what that is” grainy footage in an age where Donald Trump tweeted out classified satellite images that showed the cameras we use are actually far more advanced and show far more detail than any we knew existed. And that technology was over a decade old at the time!

      • Wollff@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        So… what were they mistaking the aliens for?

        Ghosts. Spirits. Dragons. Or any other mythical creatures, or mythical phenomena of your choice.

        If there were aliens, those are the descriptions I would expect through most of human history. And those are the descriptions I would expect in basically all the world, almost everywhere that isn’t the US, even today.

        • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          So it couldn’t be Americans mistaking ghosts for aliens? Or bigfoot, a creature that we haven’t been able to verify because their culture advanced past ours and is able to cloak themselves and occasionally go on joyrides in their more advanced technology and forget to turn on the cloaking device? We have just as much evidence for all of these things.

            • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              No, I’m pretty sure I fully understand you. I’m just pretty sure that people are either making it up or ascribing normal, terrestrial things that they don’t understand as fantastical things. There aren’t ghosts, spirits, dragons or aliens that have secretly visited earth but choses not to make actual contact. My point is that all of those things are equally unlikely. I assumed my over-the-top absurdity made that clear.

              And I feel like you might be underestimating literally all of the world if you think these things are actually aliens. You’re implying that they would assume something they don’t understand is some mystical nonsense. That “almost everywhere that isn’t the US, even today” is superstitious and wouldn’t know what aliens are.

              • Wollff@lemm.ee
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                11 months ago

                I’m just pretty sure that people are either making it up or ascribing normal, terrestrial things that they don’t understand as fantastical things.

                Yes.

                As I said: If there were aliens, those fantastical things, are the descriptions I would expect through most of human history. And in most non US places. After all, aliens are a modern US legend, invented from Americans, for Americans.

                I didn’t say that there were any aliens anywhere. Or that there were any other fantastical things anywhere.

                That “almost everywhere that isn’t the US, even today” is superstitious and wouldn’t know what aliens are

                Didn’t we just establish that aliens are superstition? I think you are overestimating how many people share “aliens” as the most popular superstition which comes to mind first.

                Most of the US shares that. A lot of other places probably don’t. Don’t underestimate how many strange stories about strange things in the night are out there :D

                • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  Ya know what? I misread this interaction. My bad. I didn’t realize we were arguing the same point. The last week has shown a lot of people on this site arguing fervently for the case of aliens visiting earth, and I made assumptions. I’m sorry buddy.

      • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        I think its like bigfoot / mothman etc - once someone in your area is talking about seeing a thing, it increases the likelihood you will think you saw that thing specifically next time you see something that would be otherwise unexplainable to you

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I have several relatives who “see” plots all the time. Every time I deal with them I get to hear about them. Bet you didn’t know that there is a plot to turn frogs gay and convert our children into drag queens.

  • oshaboy@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Meanwhile the Netherlands chilling with the extraterrestrials.

    Maybe that’s where they got their terraforming abilities.