u/cpacker

Consider two democracies in a space race against a totalitarian regime. That regime will have no problem marshalling the resources for the race because its rulers can simply command them to be deployed. The democracies, on the other hand, require public support for their tax money to be spent in the contest. One of the democracies is buzzing with reports of UFOs. The other never heard of them. Which one is going to be most supportive of shooting rockets into space to see what's out there?

These considerations lead to the hypothesis -- here extremely abbreviated -- that UFOs are entirely the invention of writers and artists who were assembled by American and British political and military planners in the 1940s who anticipated the Cold War. They contrived a pipeline of fake reports that were fed to a cooperative press. The result was basically a vast magic stunt in which the public became convinced that something was going on even though nobody ever actually saw anything. The alleged witnesses were fictional characters. Working with online newspaper archives I have been assembling material that is best explained by this model.

I live in Northeast DC about five miles northwest of Andrews AFB. How often would I expect to see an airliner-sized plane traveling north from it, possibly circling around to land -- nearly overhead at less than 2000 feet altitude? I saw just that today at 1130am. The weather was overcast with a ceiling of 5000 feet and wind from the south at 10 according to NWS.

Does this community know about Google NGram? It charts the frequency of occurrence of any word or phrase in published literature -- books, magazines, government reports, etc. -- anything that Google can vacuum up. I created this chart from it that shows that from 1950 to 1980 the alignment of "unidentified flying objects" with "weather modification" seems not to be coincidental. So should weather modification be part of the UAP story? Note especially that both terms faded from attention about the same time -- around 1980.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28unidentified+flying+objects+*+20%29%2Cweather+modification&year_start=1920&year_end=2019&corpus=en-US&smoothing=2&case_insensitive=false