A discussion about UAP/UFO videos and how we might be able to clean up this subreddit and combat disinformation.

I have some thoughts I’d like to share about this subreddit and I would love it if we could have a conversation about what we all might do to improve things around here. I would first like to give you some context about myself because I believe it will help you understand where I am coming from, I suspect there are many others here that feel the same way I do.

Skip down to “Getting to the point…” if you don’t care to read my personal experiences/thoughts.

I am 40 and I have been interested in this topic since I was a child. I watched movies like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), “Explorers” (1985), “Flight of the Navigator” (1986) so much that I wore the damn tapes out. I loved anything science-fiction that related to UFOs or aliens, I’ve read virtually every “first contact” type of book there is. Like Mulder, I want to believe.

I participated in many online message boards, read tons of non-fiction books and magazines, I even used to listen to Coast-to-Coast AM regularly even though I didn’t believe >95% of what they talked about. For many years I’ve been familiar with the likes of Leslie Kean, George Knapp, Bob Lazar, Steven Greer, Stanton Friedman, etc. I’ve even seen weird things in the sky, myself.

I worked for Raytheon in my early twenties. I was nobody important, just a logistics/supply chain paperwork pusher, and I was obsessed with UFOs. I knew some weird people there… some who believed all kinds of crazy stuff, some who didn’t believe at all, and some who avoided the subject entirely.

News Nation’s interview with David Grusch was fascinating to watch… then we had that congressional hearing. Oh boy. As much as it blew my mind to watch that hearing (I’ve watched it twice now), I think this article by The Hill does a most excellent job of laying it all out. Something weird is happening here and we need to get to the bottom of it.

Anyway… in spite of it all… and I mean all of it, going clear back to Roswell, up through the 2017 NYT article and the 7/26 congressional hearing… if you were to ask me what I think about UFOs/ETs:

I believe that people have seen things that they cannot explain, myself included. As much as I want to believe that Earth is being visited by some other intelligent, technologically advanced species, I am not convinced. If we had incontrovertible evidence — a ‘smoking gun’ so to speak — there would be no debate.

Now we’re at the point where we’ve been told by a former Intelligence Officer that there is a smoking gun. In fact, he told Congress that he could tell them exactly where to look for it, too. But now we wait. We wait to see some technology or bodies. I’m not sure what we’ll all do with that information other than celebrate, since most of us probably aren’t engineers or biologists… but we want to know, dammit!

Again, though… regardless of what you might personally believe, the fact here is that if we are still waiting for something incontrovertible. Once we get that, those that deny it can be properly ridiculed alongside flat-Earthers; the debate about “are we alone” or “are we being visited” would be over.

I work from home and my job allows me a great deal of downtime (I remotely update and babysit servers, basically). I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time in this subreddit lately because this topic has always fascinated me and my interest has been greatly renewed since the Grusch interview.

Getting to the point…

From all the time I’ve spent here, I have observed something related to reposts that is extremely detrimental to the community and topic overall, especially if we want to fight disinformation and be a helpful place where folks can come to look for information and discussion.

Quite often, the same videos get posted multiple times. Sometimes multiple times a day. Sometimes multiple times even when they’ve been sitting in top 10 “Hot” posts on the sub for a day or two. I’m not new to Reddit, obviously reposts are expected (and the mods here usually do a great job of deleting them and other garbage) but the reason I’m pointing it out is not just because “reposts are annoying.”

When these videos get reposted, I often see different thread titles or different video sources that put a different spin on what it might be… and the most frustrating thing is different comments, potentially from people that are seeing a particular video for the first time and sadly it is often videos that are blatant fakes, admittedly/proven fake, or for which fake winds up being the consensus after they get discussed to death on other threads.

I have seen some fantastic analysis and comments in some of the big video threads here, but then something will get reposted and all of that discussion goes right down the toilet. It’s devastating to watch that happen. The cycle starts over with people saying “Wow! This is interesting!” and all kinds of speculation about what it could be and whatnot. There has to be a better way for us to manage this sort of thing!

The other issue involves the quality of said videos. While we should welcome all posts that aren’t “shitposts” or reposts, we really need a better way to organize and label things, especially since we usually can’t do much with videos of distant, indiscernible blobs or lights.

So what can we do? Would new post tags help? Would adding custom location and date tags for filtering sightings and videos help or even be possible? Maybe a change to the reporting system that requires a link to the first/main thread about a video? And how can we organize all of the videos that are already posted/linked and have already been discussed?

I don’t know enough about the inner workings of Reddit to know what the solution is here, but I see a huge problem and it needs to be addressed. This place can and should be a great place for information and discussion about what is potentially the biggest story in human history, so if we can clean things up, we should.

Thanks for your time.