UFOs are Now Too Mainstream for Conspiracy Theorists
Four Leading indicators of UFO Disclosure
Leading indicators are phenomena that happen before bigger, more important effects. They’re useful for making predictions; for example, yield curve inversion is among the best-known indicators for predicting economic recession.
Anything important will begin dropping hints before it arrives, and UFO disclosure is no different. Beyond the biweekly war.gov/ufo releases, below are four additional trends that suggest things are changing:
1) Skeptic’s 180 turn
Just a few years ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson gave the odds of UFOs being “out of this world” as one in 10 million. Today, he takes them seriously and has written a book on the topic.
Though he attributes his change of opinion to a higher-quality set of witnesses (military officers rather than “farmers” and “drunken revelers”), the most recent wave of military testimony began nearly a decade ago.
This makes a change in the cultural winds a more likely explanation for Tyson’s shift and signals changes in the epistemological zeitgeist among scientists and academics.
2) Prediction Markets
Both Polymarket and Kalshi have markets on an official US confirmation of alien life. These vary, but the trend over the years has been upward, with Kalshi’s giving odds of disclosure before the end of next year at 31%.
The beauty of prediction markets is that anyone who finds this unbelievable can make free money by betting on the other side (Kalshi even returns interest on your funds while you wait).
The fact that skeptics have not bid this down to lower odds means there are either not so many skeptics or they’re not so sure.
3) Aliens.gov and Trump Post
Prior to this year, the government has been very careful to separate UFOs as a phenomenon from alien life as a phenomenon, with boring UFO task force names like AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) and AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program).
However, this year, the government registered the domain “aliens.gov”, and White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told reporters to “Stay tuned!” and included an alien emoji (👽).1
It’s a weird world where we have to interpret emoji tea leaves, and stranger still, the president posted an AI-generated image of himself walking with a shackled (and ripped) alien.
This change from “UFOs” to “aliens” is important because it’s the first official acknowledgment of a connection between the two. It could even be regarded as a first disclosure, as it’s a statment of “these two things are related.”
4) UFOs are Now Too Mainstream for Conspiracy Theorists
I have a conspiracy-minded friend, and when I spoke to him around 2021, he was supportive of the idea that the US government knew about UFOs but was keeping it hushed up.
Now, when we talk about it, he thinks the whistle-blower testimony and government releases are part of a misdirection campaign.
The conspiratorial world-view is that nothing is at it appears, and everything has a hidden purpose. If evidence of UFOs becomes sufficiently straightforward, then to the conspiracy theorist, it must not be what appears i.e. evidence of non-human intelligence.
This emoji seems to indicate that the “aliens” in question are space aliens rather than illegal aliens.