For a moment, I thought this was a cryptid instance and briefly wondered what level of crazy believes that Bigfoot will put you in the ground if you don't believe in him.

It's much more complicated than that, unfortunately. I've been following this for some time, purely for my own entertainment.

This primarily started with the Nimitz Incident, when the military released official video of what they claim is unknown technology. This received little attention, except for civilians taking interest and making it heard. Fravor, for example, was brought on talk shows to give his account.

Not much was then heard for a few years, until a new whistleblower hotline was implemented, ostensibly for the sake of digging up dirt on Democrats.

David Grusch's story is that he has been working for UAP-adjacent programs for some time, and in his career, has heard a number of very disturbing secrets. Claiming he's a boy scout, he has used this new whistleblower hotline to try and drag this out into the light, and he claims he has names and locations of ET material, as well as direct knowledge of the location of massive amounts of taxpayer money that the Pentagon "lost." To use a metaphor, a net that was meant for minnows may have caught a shark, and Congress has finally taken notice.

Now others are following his lead in using the whistleblower hotline. The other two in the hearing have similar stories and testimonies, and all three have staked their reputations and careers on this, to whatever end that means. According to Grusch, he has already been targeted and is currently being protected from further retaliation.

The purpose of the hearing was to put their testimonies into official record, which is VERY interesting, given how outlandish their claims are. This is the first time such testimonies were given credence.

Also very interesting, during the hearing, Matt Gaetz weighed in with a testimony of his own. Cautiously putting politics aside, Gaetz has, at the very least, said some VERY strange things for any sitting representative to say. He has risked being labeled a full on loon for this, which while not totally devastating for a Republican these days, I don't imagine is exactly preferred.

This is some of the most extraordinary events related to UFOs and aliens in many decades, even if you ignore the endless sea of bullshit that surrounds the UFO community.

When I trawl the net for UFO stuff, what I see more than anything is people hoping for a savior. People hoping that aliens will save us from our economy, from climate change, from religion, from fascism, from war, from nuclear weapons, from disease, from Republicans, from Democrats, from progressives, from regressives, and mostly from ourselves.

I've been speculating that that fear is a driving force for a lot of the current UFO craze. We're in a dangerous time, things are only getting worse, and people are becoming desperate for a superhero to come and save the day.

I think we're more scared that there aren't aliens, sometimes.

Yeah. There is an increasing chance that the US government is being forced into disclosure of evidence that they have UFOs and other ET material. I would suggest looking into David Grusch and the Nimitz Incident to know more. The US military is currently claiming they have substantiated evidence of ET life on our planet.

EDIT: Despite people's very sensible cynicism, this is the biggest UFO-related news to come out in more than 70 years. The situation is currently very complicated and there is definitely no clear answers, but it's very interesting.

This has been the response to everything that's come out since the Nimitz Incident. Bigger revelations have come out in the last seven years than in the last seventy. We're tired, and we're scared, I think. Aliens are going to need to really shake their cans if they want us to care.

After being gone from it since Star Trek Enterprise, my wife and I got back in with Star Trek Lower Decks (oddly enough). If you can handle it being animated (and goofy), it is actually a very dearly written love-letter to TNG and some of the most important moments in Star Trek lore. We appreciated that it didn't try to reinvent characters that already exist, and did a good job of bringing on old actors for cameos. They bring on people from TNG, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager all the time to reprise their roles.

There's a live-action Star Trek currently running that I can't attest to, but it has a crossover with Lower Decks that means I'm going to give it a try.

What I would actually do with a time machine.

EDIT; I forgot this was the internet when I wrote this comment. Hopefully editing helps remove it more thoroughly.

They did last year as well. I recall there being some racy stuff that was being blocked out by black boxes placed by the admins, and people were able to track admin and mod accounts (like spez) that were placing pixels instantly with no cooldown. People were pissed then already, and the admin/mod response was basically "get wrecked we too smort lulz"

Place even last year was blatantly a ploy to give reddit more free and controllable content.

Which is the point of all of this. They've been flexing their ability to control the flow of information on their site to show off for investors since the minute they announced the API changes. They're going to use Place to further demonstrate the level of control they have over the userbase by "shutting down the protests." Advertisers and investors are going to be eating this up, especially since so many people are still engaging and giving hate-clicks along the way. Imagine how attractive a completely pliable and obedient userbase of literal millions of progressive swing voters is going to look.

I wanna be, the very best...

Quality has been dramatically better here than Reddit has been for many years. Finding people actually discussing the post in the comments is rare on Reddit, you have to sift through endless lines of off topic puns and memes being promoted by bots for karma farming. The goal of comments on Reddit is to be funny, not interesting or useful. The fediverse is more like Reddit eight or nine years ago, when they were figuring out their control algorithms, building their own bot network to game their own site (remember the subreddit where the reddit-built bots used to exclusively talk with each other for practice? I wonder what those bots are doing today...), and learning how to control the flow of information on their page while also finally making some things more stable.

I'm really curious if any parts of the fediverse can avoid the same pitfalls that Reddit eagerly jumped into. It's probably doubtful since once the advertisers get here, greed will win. It always does. But maybe.