Many of the people here believe that the main ufo celebrity voices are actually fighting for the truth, and not just their own financial incentives.
The issue is, once you start making a career off one side of the story being true, your financial wellbeing is now in direct conflict with the truth, if it turns out aliens don’t exist. If your entire career, reputation and income is based around aliens being real, you have absolutely no incentive to ever admit you were wrong or reveal the truth, even if you were shown 100% undeniable proof that we haven’t been visited or have any alien craft.
Here’s the real truth about people like Sheehan, Coulthart, Nolan, etc.
They are entertainers. If they were fighting for the truth they wouldn’t constantly dangle carrots in front of people like “tune in next week for my super secret reveal” as if they’re a sitcom tv show.
These people all run in the same circle and they use self referential confirmation which likely all relies on the same sources. They use tricks such as constantly trying to stay front and center of attention to take advantage of availability bias which causes people to believe things they hear about more often are more likely to be true.
They use appeal to authority fallacies to make people believe that because they’re an expert in “x” field that their claims must be true – ”Why would Danny Sheehan lie? He’s such a highly respected lawyer!”/“Of course we should trust Garry Nolan when he says a material is anomalous, he’s got a PHD!” (In immunology)
They use appeal to ignorance fallacies to convince people that because the government is trying so hard to shut down the claims about UFOs, that it must be true. Or that because there’s no evidence to prove aliens don’t exist, then they have to exist! Or that because no one has proven that they’re lying, that they must be telling the truth! These are all examples of appeal to ignorance fallacies.
They take advantage of things like the primacy effect to get ahead of stories that they know will challenge their narrative, exactly like what happened before the release of this report. Because they already primed the community to believe this report was bogus and designed to discredit the community, everybody already had that conclusion made up before they saw the report.
Confirmation bias is so powerful it causes people to automatically dismiss any information that challenges their existing beliefs and only seek out information that confirms what they already believe. It creates psychological tension when someone is confronted with ideas that make them question or doubt their beliefs and so people just choose to ignore that information rather than actually examine whether or not what they believe is true.
People here are so deep into the sunk cost fallacy that to admit they might be wrong or have been fooled would mean they’ve wasted years or decades of their life hyper focused on a belief that was complete bullshit and will go against their best interests and vote for politicians who support this topic, even if everything else they believe is terrible for the voter.
I could go on and on listing the various cognitive biases and logical fallacies that this community is hopelessly conditioned by, but it always falls on deaf ears here.
submitted by /u/ApprenticeWrangler
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