tolman wrote:

psikeyhackr wrote:9/11 has just made the cultural stupidity really obvious.

People in the nation that put men on the Moon can't figure out the importance of knowing the steel and concrete distributions in analysing any supposed collapses of skyscrapers.

Those people would be
a) People who wouldn't have a fucking clue what to do with the figures if they were in front of them.
and
b) People who would, but who for some reason don't seem to be concerned.

As someone who clearly belongs in group a), as you have demonstrated by your posts here, maybe you should keep your thought to yourself.

Still it's interesting to see you're finding lots of laughs from 9/11.
But then many conspiracy theorists do seem to see conspiracies as some form of sick entertainment.

What's this all about? Seems there's a history between you two.

trubble76 wrote:On the one hand, a fervent belief that the government is working against your interests is harmful when the government is your elected representatives, what realistic alternatives are there to democratically electing representatives?

On the other hand, our governments really are found to be working against our interests on a fairly regular basis, corruption being the most obvious example.

The only real solution, I feel, lies in creating a system which minimises corruption. This is easier said than done, largely because the people who most benefit from corruption are the ones tasked with ending it.
Look at the USA for example, it is often touted as the exemplar democracy but, to my eyes at least, it is horrifically corrupt. A similar charge could be applied to most countries, I'm not intending to pick on the USA.

How do you distribute power without distributing the ability to use that power for your own interests?

I'll try to ignore the annoying pair who are calling each other names and side-tracking this thread above.

Directly to the title question:

No, democracy is not being destroyed by conspiracy theories. Some people who are trying to destroy democracy, are USING conspiracy theories and accusations as a way to manipulate gullible and or fearful followers into helping them destroy their own lives, but the theories themselves aren't doing anything.

Looking at the many conspiracy ideas themselves: they come from many sources, and have many different reasons to have been created, and even more different reasons to have been promoted and carried forward and maintained and even expanded. There are some very simple ones, which are fairly straightforward, and were really created directly out of the resentments of the people who came up with them. Others are very complex, and some of these grew out of an initial real set of events, and were turned INTO paranoid fantasies by greedy and nefarious people, in order to use them for political and personal gain.

I have heard lots of them which really come down to being "fun" things for the followers to believe. Space alien stuff is often as not just that. Nothing radically threatening for most believers, just the fun of hoping that the super smart space guys will come save us, or at least give us some really cool new games to play, and maybe some flying cars.

The current crop over here, which really are being used to decrease democracy, were artificially built, starting from a core refusal of some people to accept that they were in the minority in voting. They expanded and went wild pretending to believe all sorts of obvious nonsense, not because they actually care one way or another about the "conspiracy" they proclaim, rather because they hope that by scaring enough people into BELIEVING that a conspiracy exists, they can get those same idiots to hand over all real power to them, and put an end to the annoying fact that real democracy keeps causing them to lose.

This is a very old game which has been played by wanna-be despots throughout our History. They are always VERY dangerous, and have all too often been successful. Various religious dictatorships were built using this trick, as well as most of the more modern dictatorships, which were all SUPPOSED to have been ushering in the advent of true freedom, justice, and happiness for everyone. They include Nazism, Communism, and especially the various modern bastardizations of Capitalism, which proclaim that "Free Market Capitalism" necessitates an end to all moral considerations which don't result in profit to private individuals. Anti-government conspiracies are promoted by people who hope to use them to get themselves put into power in place of the government. Actual conspiracies, such as Al Qaeda, are being used by various peoples to gain personal wealth, and to increase government powers at the expense of privacy and personal security.

In short, it's more complicated than most people wish it were.

Imagination Theory wrote:Government and media do lie and misled. You really can't trust any of them to have correct information. I'm not sure how this will destroy democracy.

When they are wrong, media reports are often wrong though simple error, or through stopping looking for information when they have evidence for what they think is the case or want to believe is the case.

Though along with being more deliberately misleading, things like that tend to come out in time, and be visible to people who are looking at more than one source.

Yes, well, there ARE some media groups, and some media individuals, who do purposely shape their reporting on the basis of an agenda. Most simply do what works to make money for them, which is why we always see so much reporting of relatively meaningless scandals of famous people, and why we see so many "OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE ANYONE COULD DO THIS" sorts of things.

What has also always been true, is that powerful people in and out of governments know how to use the medias bad habits and functional failings to control the news itself. A fair amount of the "conspiracy" to "hide" space aliens from Americans, was actually a conscious effort to obscure various far less prosaic secret programs and technology developments. Encouraging people to believe in space aliens, is a good way to pretend both to them, and to ones' enemies, that those flying craft that dart into foreign air spaces, or hover over our own lands, are actually mysterious beings from elsewhere, and not really modern spy technology. It was indeed a conspiracy, just not the EXACT conspiracy that so many people thought it was.

igorfrankensteen wrote:Yes, well, there ARE some media groups, and some media individuals, who do purposely shape their reporting on the basis of an agenda. Most simply do what works to make money for them, which is why we always see so much reporting of relatively meaningless scandals of famous people, and why we see so many "OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE ANYONE COULD DO THIS" sorts of things.

Though one might argue that at least in places where there is choice, the consumers are generally aware of different presentations of reality and choose some over others, even if they see or pretend that they are choosing honest reporting over bias.
Obviously, various sources are likely to try and suggest that they are the ones telling things as they are, but if they all do that, few people seem likely to believe all the claims.

igorfrankensteen wrote:What has also always been true, is that powerful people in and out of governments know how to use the medias bad habits and functional failings to control the news itself. A fair amount of the "conspiracy" to "hide" space aliens from Americans, was actually a conscious effort to obscure various far less prosaic secret programs and technology developments. Encouraging people to believe in space aliens, is a good way to pretend both to them, and to ones' enemies, that those flying craft that dart into foreign air spaces, or hover over our own lands, are actually mysterious beings from elsewhere, and not really modern spy technology. It was indeed a conspiracy, just not the EXACT conspiracy that so many people thought it was.

You reckon the USSR dismissed many detected incursions of airspace as being down to Little Green Men?

Possibly having various weirdos making all kind of fantastic claims about UFOs does provide some useful background noise to help mask less sensational reports of things citizens have seen in case such things might be useful to an enemy.

Though in the case of the USA's secrets, I assume they would have expected that there would be various Soviet agents living near US air bases and keeping their eyes open.

Indeed, encouraging UFO nuts does provide a plausible cover for people wandering around with binoculars, or with cameras trying to photograph ET, in places where such behaviour would otherwise be more definitively dodgy.
One could put a case that fostering UFO belief among American citizens was a Soviet ploy.

You reckon the USSR dismissed many detected incursions of airspace as being down to Little Green Men?
tolman

Not at all. How EFFECTIVE a given attempt to manipulate conspiracies or the news is a separate subject from the fact that it is attempted.

igorfrankensteen wrote:

You reckon the USSR dismissed many detected incursions of airspace as being down to Little Green Men?
tolman

Not at all. How EFFECTIVE a given attempt to manipulate conspiracies or the news is a separate subject from the fact that it is attempted.

Right.

So when you said:

igorfrankensteen wrote:Encouraging people to believe in space aliens, is a good way to pretend both to them, and to ones' enemies, that those flying craft that dart into foreign air spaces, or hover over our own lands, are actually mysterious beings from elsewhere, and not really modern spy technology. It was indeed a conspiracy, just not the EXACT conspiracy that so many people thought it was.

By 'is a good way', what did you mean by 'good' if the way didn't work, and arguably wouldn't really have been expected to work?

What would a bad way be?
One which didn't work, wouldn't be expected to work and cost a lot of money?

So picky.

It really doesn't matter (as someone else explained to me in another thread). All there is to what I said is, that some of the "conspiracies" in the world were concocted to be cover-stories, or general obfuscations. The Aliens thing was never JUST a trick being played by the government, it was like most of these conspiracies, just as I've been trying to say: there were people who were eager to think that we were being visited by space aliens; someone saw an opportunity to use that to sew confusions about other real things that were going on.

By the way, according to some reports that surfaced out of the rubble of the USSR, have included several instances where things LIKE the concern about space aliens DID result in the Soviet government investing time and money in chasing things down. Every ruble spent on a scam or trick, is a ruble less spent on attacking us.

Note also, that it isn't JUST the USSR who reported such sightings, it was allies as well. The function of allowing and reinforcing a conspiracy theory about Space Aliens could have helped hide all sorts of things. Anyone who claimed to have witnessed a real advanced terrestrial device being tested by us or our allies, could be made to appear to be just another Space Alien nut. If nothing else, it would also help us to trick the USSR into thinking that WE were so caught up with it all, that they might discount such sightings and not realize what our military was up to.

But really, calm down. I'm not trying to show that I personally know in minute detail the exact tricks used by certain nefarious entities within the government, I'm pointing out (in answer to the thread question) how conspiracy ideas can be both actual conspiracies, AND be the fantasies of a bunch of paranoid people at the same time.

Think a little, please.

igorfrankensteen wrote:So picky.

What's 'picky' about asking what is good about a plan which would seem likely to have appeared in advance to be unlikely to achieve what you claim would have been the object?

igorfrankensteen wrote:It really doesn't matter (as someone else explained to me in another thread). All there is to what I said is, that some of the "conspiracies" in the world were concocted to be cover-stories, or general obfuscations. The Aliens thing was never JUST a trick being played by the government, it was like most of these conspiracies, just as I've been trying to say: there were people who were eager to think that we were being visited by space aliens; someone saw an opportunity to use that to sew confusions about other real things that were going on.

Personally I would have thought that in the case of 'aliens', The Authorities need have done no more (and quite possibly did no more) than what would be expected of them for other reasons.
For instance, various bases were kept secret and under high security for perfectly mundane terrestrial reasons.
If some experimental craft (probably 'ours' but maybe occasionally 'theirs') crashes, the authorities rush to collect all the bits and pieces under tight security and that provides a breeding ground for 'alien landing' tales without 'them' needing to do anything other than the entirely expected keeping quiet about precisely what they were doing.

igorfrankensteen wrote:By the way, according to some reports that surfaced out of the rubble of the USSR, have included several instances where things LIKE the concern about space aliens DID result in the Soviet government investing time and money in chasing things down. Every ruble spent on a scam or trick, is a ruble less spent on attacking us.

Well, it's debatable whether funding a few people to stare at goats or the like actually made much difference to the number of warheads on either side.
Or, indeed, whether even having 10% or 20% or 50% fewer warheads would have made any real difference to the end result if there had been a war.

Whether having the odd woo-ish person in one or other government or military wondering if the other side might be able to read minds at a distance or telekinetically disable missiles would actually contribute positively or negatively to mutual paranoia, one might think hard to guess.

Though in some of the more woo-ey cases, what seemed to happen was one side responding to intelligence that the other side was looking at some far-out area by trying to match effort just in case there was something in it, or something useful that might be stumbled on by people pursuing woo.
In some cases, possibly work was done largely so that if some woo-inclined person higher up asked 'why aren't we doing that', arses were suitably covered.
If your boss or your boss's boss happens to believe in ESP, it might pay to be a bit of a believer yourself, and being in politics or the military doesn't make people immune to woo.

But that seems some way from hoping that Uncle Boris would dismiss radar contacts from U2s or SR71s as being benign aliens.

igorfrankensteen wrote:Note also, that it isn't JUST the USSR who reported such sightings, it was allies as well. The function of allowing and reinforcing a conspiracy theory about Space Aliens could have helped hide all sorts of things. Anyone who claimed to have witnessed a real advanced terrestrial device being tested by us or our allies, could be made to appear to be just another Space Alien nut. If nothing else, it would also help us to trick the USSR into thinking that WE were so caught up with it all, that they might discount such sightings and not realize what our military was up to.

Well, even without their mundane spies giving them a damn good idea of much of what we were doing (which or course we didn't know at the time), they would have been fairly sure we were trying to develop all kinds of weapons by normal means, since that's the obvious thing to do, and what they were doing.

Arguably one thing that alien sightings have done is shown how bad the average person is at being an observer of things they don't already understand.
Some youth's home-made bin-bag hot-air-balloon catching fire and falling to the ground ends up being reported as alien spacecraft hurtling around as well as a microlight crashing in flames.
Arguably the main use of alien tales there to the authorities could be to give a bogus prior explanation someone can warp their observations to fit.
However, once the alien idea had started, it seems likely to have needed any encouragement, and it would seem that the genesis of the idea is likely down to things like films and TV shows. It would seem a streatch to suggest the whole idea was dreamed up for disinformation purposes, and there would seem a fairly narrow window between finding out some people actually took the idea seriously and the idea having enough momentum that assisting it would be rather pointless.

However, even without any warping, someone reporting 'lights in the sky seeming to hover and moving away quickly' seems fairly unlikely to provide much useful intelligence to people running the Soviet weapons program.

However, once the alien idea had started, it seems likely to have needed any encouragement, and it would seem that the genesis of the idea is likely down to things like films and TV shows. It would seem a streatch to suggest the whole idea was dreamed up for disinformation purposes, and there would seem a fairly narrow window between finding out some people actually took the idea seriously and the idea having enough momentum that assisting it would be rather pointless.

However, even without any warping, someone reporting 'lights in the sky seeming to hover and moving away quickly' seems fairly unlikely to provide much useful intelligence to people running the Soviet weapons program.

I would agree with all that, save that I think you meant to say "UNlikely to have needed any encouragement." What I am talking about is, I think, more subtle than you realize.

Conspiracy ideas spring up out of the fearful imaginations of individuals, and are augmented like cartoon snowballs rolling down a hill. Some might be initiated on purpose, either by sneaky people with personal profit motives, or by government people working to encourage an absurd cover story for a secret program. The main thing I'm getting at is, that when someone has something that they want to hide, and someone else comes along with a crazy explanation that revs everyone up and confuses rational investigation, the people hiding things can begin to work actively to encourage the nuttiness. They can do it from government positions, by purposely saying that the conspiracy idea IS nutty, but make their accusations crudely and clumsily on purpose, thus actually providing worried people with extra reason to believe the nutty story.

A good thing to do to appreciate the kind of ting I'm trying to point out, is to read up about the tricks of misdirection that were played during World War 2, to fool the enemy into making all sorts of tactical errors.

Have you noticed that once someone who is complaining about a government conspiracy (for example) can be shown to believe something really "out there," that everyone stops listening to them when they say things that might actually be true?

The clever people of this world don't try to create perfect conspiracy stories to mislead others. What works best, on the most people, is to create faulty stories, and even better, to build on the many existing stories.

Your example of how reports of lights in the sky doesn't provide the enemy with detailed information about a secret program is correct, but that is exactly the point I am trying to get across. What such a report CAN do, after the conspiracy or space alien story is established, is to get the enemy to IGNORE some reports, which could have told them that we were up to something somewhere.

Misdirection is a much more complicated game than you have so far realized.

igorfrankensteen wrote:

However, once the alien idea had started, it seems likely to have needed any encouragement, and it would seem that the genesis of the idea is likely down to things like films and TV shows. It would seem a stretch to suggest the whole idea was dreamed up for disinformation purposes, and there would seem a fairly narrow window between finding out some people actually took the idea seriously and the idea having enough momentum that assisting it would be rather pointless.

However, even without any warping, someone reporting 'lights in the sky seeming to hover and moving away quickly' seems fairly unlikely to provide much useful intelligence to people running the Soviet weapons program.

I would agree with all that, save that I think you meant to say "UNlikely to have needed any encouragement." What I am talking about is, I think, more subtle than you realize.

Whether something did or didn't get encouragement is a separate issue from whether such alleged encouragement was actually necessary.
I can encourage a top sports team to win by cheering them, but whether my cheering was actually needed...

igorfrankensteen wrote:Conspiracy ideas spring up out of the fearful imaginations of individuals, and are augmented like cartoon snowballs rolling down a hill. Some might be initiated on purpose, either by sneaky people with personal profit motives, or by government people working to encourage an absurd cover story for a secret program. The main thing I'm getting at is, that when someone has something that they want to hide, and someone else comes along with a crazy explanation that revs everyone up and confuses rational investigation, the people hiding things can begin to work actively to encourage the nuttiness. They can do it from government positions, by purposely saying that the conspiracy idea IS nutty, but make their accusations crudely and clumsily on purpose, thus actually providing worried people with extra reason to believe the nutty story.

Sure, they can do it.
The question with alien sightings is whether they actively did do it to any meaningful extent, and whether even if they did, such encouragement made any real difference.

And then whether even if one or more people did encourage things, that was done for serious reasons other than their own entertainment, and whether even if done because they saw some possible advantage, whether that would meaningfully be describable as a conspiracy in the sense that conspiracy theorists seem to use the word.
I can certainly see individuals getting significant amusement from pretending (or failing to challenge suggestions) that there might be alien artifacts on the secret base they worked at. It would seem unlikely that there would be official reprimands for allowing such ideas to go unchallenged, and it would probably be more fun than not being allowed to make any kind of hint as to what might actually be going on there.
Similarly, there can also be some people in the military who share the desire of others that aliens do exist.

I'd only really see there being a conspiracy where senior people had got together and decided there should be some collective disinformation scheme - if there was a situation where some individuals saw no harm and potential usefulness in having people talking about aliens, that's no more a conspiracy to spread disinformation than having individuals in an organisation deciding to overcharge customers is a conspiracy to defraud.

You could certainly say that even two people of any seniority getting together and deciding some course of action is a conspiracy, but if so, I'd suggest that with regard to alien visitation, as well as anything else that may have happened, there were likely numerous conspiracies to take the piss concocted in bars by military personnel.

igorfrankensteen wrote:A good thing to do to appreciate the kind of ting I'm trying to point out, is to read up about the tricks of misdirection that were played during World War 2, to fool the enemy into making all sorts of tactical errors.

A lot of that did happen, but then it was a unique situation, where the Allied side had a huge advantage in terms of signals intelligence which meant they had a very good idea of exactly how their various ploys were being seen at the higher levels of the enemy, where very long and subtle games could be played and fine-tuned based on reliable feedback, and where knowing the enemy's expectations and fears, steps could be taken to use those expectations to great advantage.
If you know the enemy fears an attack in Norway, it's not only possible to play on that fear, but possible to be much more confident in advance that a deception aimed at playing on that fear is likely to work in at least the short term than if you know they consider an attack there unlikely, or not a great threat.

igorfrankensteen wrote:Have you noticed that once someone who is complaining about a government conspiracy (for example) can be shown to believe something really "out there," that everyone stops listening to them when they say things that might actually be true?

I've noticed that when someone believes things which appear to lack any basis in objective evidence, people tend to have less trust in other claims they make which lack the backing of objective evidence.

If someone claimed that they had seen an eagle land in their back garden, people would tend to be likely to put less faith in that if the person claimed they had seen three spaceships last night.
But if they had a video of an eagle landing in their back garden...

igorfrankensteen wrote:The clever people of this world don't try to create perfect conspiracy stories to mislead others. What works best, on the most people, is to create faulty stories, and even better, to build on the many existing stories.

What evidence do you have that clever people are generating conspiracy theories for misdirection regarding real events where there are real underlying conspiracies involving the clever people?
And where there are many existing different (and hence faulty) stories, is there usually much practical need for any more?

igorfrankensteen wrote:Your example of how reports of lights in the sky doesn't provide the enemy with detailed information about a secret program is correct, but that is exactly the point I am trying to get across. What such a report CAN do, after the conspiracy or space alien story is established, is to get the enemy to IGNORE some reports, which could have told them that we were up to something somewhere.

What, by the enemy assuming that UFO==alien and therefore of no interest?
Or assuming that people were making up stories entirely rather than interpreting experimental aircraft through a UFO filter?

And doesn't encouraging people to see things in the sky as alien spacecraft rather than terrestrial technology seriously encourage people to look harder at them?
Without alien claims, would people not just assume lights in the sky or things flying around in the day were just some aircraft somewhere, and pay little more attention to them?
Who would bother trying to film and photograph things in the sky which they thought were just regular human machines?

igorfrankensteen wrote:Misdirection is a much more complicated game than you have so far realized.

I could say the same to you.
Would the clever people of the world not be likely to wonder whether creating conspiracy theories around actual conspiracies is likely to be more danger than benefit?

Personally, if I was involved in a conspiracy, if I was aiming to misdirect, I might wonder whether the best target for fake theories would be events which weren't the result of conspiracies I was involved in.
But if I was involved in a conspiracy, I'd first direct my attention to making sure any plans I made were as simple and compact as possible, and likely to leave little or no evidence that could point to a conspiracy in the first place, so nothing that needed covering up.
Having to misdirect after the event with bogus conspiracy theories rather than just promoting the cover story (or having manufactured events so that the cover story was what all the evidence pointed other people to) would to me be a sign of incompetence in planning or execution. And incompetence in execution is typically substantially a result of poor planning.

You are reading WAAAAY more into this than I have put into it. Challenging me to prove things that I never even said. Again, calm down. The answers to most of your rhetorical questions are already in the thread, especially where I suggested that you ACTUALLY RESEARCH historic efforts to fool enemies. You didn't do that, you instead extrapolated a series of assumptions, and then attacked me as though I did all the extrapolating.

At this point, I can tell you have an ax to grind about this, but I have no idea what exact point you are trying to make.

As I said, you will find your answers when you actually do the research, and stop imagining how things must have been based on your (incorrect, as it happens) assumptions.

igorfrankensteen wrote:I'll try to ignore the annoying pair who are calling each other names and side-tracking this thread above.

Directly to the title question:

No, democracy is not being destroyed by conspiracy theories. Some people who are trying to destroy democracy, are USING conspiracy theories and accusations as a way to manipulate gullible and or fearful followers into helping them destroy their own lives, but the theories themselves aren't doing anything.

I quite agree - it's not conspiracy theories which are destroying democracy, but I suspect there are many anti-democratic conspiracies.

Looking at the many conspiracy ideas themselves: they come from many sources, and have many different reasons to have been created, and even more different reasons to have been promoted and carried forward and maintained and even expanded. There are some very simple ones, which are fairly straightforward, and were really created directly out of the resentments of the people who came up with them. Others are very complex, and some of these grew out of an initial real set of events, and were turned INTO paranoid fantasies by greedy and nefarious people, in order to use them for political and personal gain.

I'd suggest the foremost spur to the suspicion of conspiracy in any given situation is the historic reality of conspiracies. Hardly a day goes by without some corporate, governmental, or criminal conspiracy being exposed. With that background knowledge it's very easy to turn that awareness of the possibility of conspiracy into a probability.

I have heard lots of them which really come down to being "fun" things for the followers to believe. Space alien stuff is often as not just that. Nothing radically threatening for most believers, just the fun of hoping that the super smart space guys will come save us, or at least give us some really cool new games to play, and maybe some flying cars.

I'm hoping for a replicator like on Star Trek - it seems like a microwave you needn't put the food into to take it out of.

The current crop over here, which really are being used to decrease democracy, were artificially built, starting from a core refusal of some people to accept that they were in the minority in voting. They expanded and went wild pretending to believe all sorts of obvious nonsense, not because they actually care one way or another about the "conspiracy" they proclaim, rather because they hope that by scaring enough people into BELIEVING that a conspiracy exists, they can get those same idiots to hand over all real power to them, and put an end to the annoying fact that real democracy keeps causing them to lose.

I agree there are definitely some 'top down' conspiracies being sold to the public from positions of authority.

This is a very old game which has been played by wanna-be despots throughout our History. They are always VERY dangerous, and have all too often been successful. Various religious dictatorships were built using this trick, as well as most of the more modern dictatorships, which were all SUPPOSED to have been ushering in the advent of true freedom, justice, and happiness for everyone. They include Nazism, Communism, and especially the various modern bastardizations of Capitalism, which proclaim that "Free Market Capitalism" necessitates an end to all moral considerations which don't result in profit to private individuals. Anti-government conspiracies are promoted by people who hope to use them to get themselves put into power in place of the government. Actual conspiracies, such as Al Qaeda, are being used by various peoples to gain personal wealth, and to increase government powers at the expense of privacy and personal security.

In short, it's more complicated than most people wish it were.

I agree, it's quite complicated.

One major complication I see is that the existence of actual conspiracies is confused with the phrase 'conspiracy theory' used as a pejorative. Yes, it may only be a theory, just as evolution is 'only a theory' - but every theory (whether about evolution or a conspiracy) has to stand or fall by its own merits.

Imagination Theory wrote:Government and media do lie and misled. You really can't trust any of them to have correct information. I'm not sure how this will destroy democracy.

That governments and media lie would be obvious to any observer.

...and when they're not outright lying they can be mistaken.

In my view it is detrimental to democracy when the citizens are disinformed.

igorfrankensteen wrote:

However, once the alien idea had started, it seems likely to have needed any encouragement, and it would seem that the genesis of the idea is likely down to things like films and TV shows. It would seem a streatch to suggest the whole idea was dreamed up for disinformation purposes, and there would seem a fairly narrow window between finding out some people actually took the idea seriously and the idea having enough momentum that assisting it would be rather pointless.

However, even without any warping, someone reporting 'lights in the sky seeming to hover and moving away quickly' seems fairly unlikely to provide much useful intelligence to people running the Soviet weapons program.

I would agree with all that, save that I think you meant to say "UNlikely to have needed any encouragement." What I am talking about is, I think, more subtle than you realize.

Conspiracy ideas spring up out of the fearful imaginations of individuals, and are augmented like cartoon snowballs rolling down a hill. Some might be initiated on purpose, either by sneaky people with personal profit motives, or by government people working to encourage an absurd cover story for a secret program. The main thing I'm getting at is, that when someone has something that they want to hide, and someone else comes along with a crazy explanation that revs everyone up and confuses rational investigation, the people hiding things can begin to work actively to encourage the nuttiness. They can do it from government positions, by purposely saying that the conspiracy idea IS nutty, but make their accusations crudely and clumsily on purpose, thus actually providing worried people with extra reason to believe the nutty story.

A good thing to do to appreciate the kind of thing I'm trying to point out, is to read up about the tricks of misdirection that were played during World War 2, to fool the enemy into making all sorts of tactical errors.

Have you noticed that once someone who is complaining about a government conspiracy (for example) can be shown to believe something really "out there," that everyone stops listening to them when they say things that might actually be true?

The clever people of this world don't try to create perfect conspiracy stories to mislead others. What works best, on the most people, is to create faulty stories, and even better, to build on the many existing stories.

Your example of how reports of lights in the sky doesn't provide the enemy with detailed information about a secret program is correct, but that is exactly the point I am trying to get across. What such a report CAN do, after the conspiracy or space alien story is established, is to get the enemy to IGNORE some reports, which could have told them that we were up to something somewhere.

Misdirection is a much more complicated game than you have so far realized.

This is very perceptive!

igorfrankensteen wrote:You are reading WAAAAY more into this than I have put into it. Challenging me to prove things that I never even said. Again, calm down.

I'm perfectly calm. Thanks for your concern.

I had hoped that replying to you might result in something more than dismissal.
Would you rather have had me just ignore you, or just replied to the odd point you made while discarding the rest?

Where was I imagining how things must have been, rather than wondering about how they might have been, or trying to present perspectives other than yours.
Is that latter thing actually bad for someone seeking enlightenment?
Where did I say that anything you suggested happened simply didn't happen, and what was I 'challenging you to prove' on any personal level, rather than simply and calmly asking for evidence of?
Shouldn't I ask where evidence is on a rational skepticism forum?

Actually, I think I understand a reasonable amount about intelligence and misdirection in WWII being used to lead the enemy into making both tactical and strategic errors. Volume 5 of the official history of British Intelligence in WWII is definitely an entertaining read on that topic, particularly the bogus-order-of-battle topic, which after its origins in the middle east, seems to have ended up being much larger and more significant than was originally anticipated.
But as seems clear, that was a situation where the intelligence asymmetry between the sides really could justifiably be called unique - over a large period of time, the British could read most of the German signals including eventually the Lorenz, and the Germans didn't have a single free agent in Britain, but believed that they had multiple reliable agents, all of whom were actually working for the British, or were fictional people invented by people working for the British. It doesn't get much better than that.

As for UFOs, just as people can see lights in the sky through UFO filters, people can see the UFO phenomenon through conspiracy filters and come to the same conclusions whether there was or wasn't a meaningful conspiracy encouraging belief at any stage.
Just as they obviously could the other way if they had a non-conspiracy filter, at least in the absence of clear evidence a conspiracy did actually do anything meaningful to encourage belief.
Though when things are hazy and there is no great evidence one way or another, making any firm conclusion seems dodgy.

The issue with some (and I do mean some) conspiracy believers is that their world is so black and white that they can't accept that there are people who can look at their arguments and be unimpressed without those people being either members of the conspiracy or dupes of it.
If they put forward a logically flawed argument and someone points at the flaws, their immediate reaction is that the criticism must stem from someone else's bias rather than possibly their own incompetence at constructing rational arguments.
While it's possibly rather uncharitable, as an engineer I've found that various black boxes can often be understood by looking at how flawed versions misbehave when they are suitably stimulated, and other people are rather black boxes to me, which does make defective people objects of some curiosity.

igorfrankensteen wrote:Yes, well, there ARE some media groups, and some media individuals, who do purposely shape their reporting on the basis of an agenda. Most simply do what works to make money for them, which is why we always see so much reporting of relatively meaningless scandals of famous people, and why we see so many "OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE ANYONE COULD DO THIS" sorts of things.

What has also always been true, is that powerful people in and out of governments know how to use the medias bad habits and functional failings to control the news itself. A fair amount of the "conspiracy" to "hide" space aliens from Americans, was actually a conscious effort to obscure various far less prosaic secret programs and technology developments. Encouraging people to believe in space aliens, is a good way to pretend both to them, and to ones' enemies, that those flying craft that dart into foreign air spaces, or hover over our own lands, are actually mysterious beings from elsewhere, and not really modern spy technology. It was indeed a conspiracy, just not the EXACT conspiracy that so many people thought it was.

That's exactly what it was, the USSR first started it.

Imagination Theory wrote:

igorfrankensteen wrote:Yes, well, there ARE some media groups, and some media individuals, who do purposely shape their reporting on the basis of an agenda. Most simply do what works to make money for them, which is why we always see so much reporting of relatively meaningless scandals of famous people, and why we see so many "OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE ANYONE COULD DO THIS" sorts of things.

What has also always been true, is that powerful people in and out of governments know how to use the medias bad habits and functional failings to control the news itself. A fair amount of the "conspiracy" to "hide" space aliens from Americans, was actually a conscious effort to obscure various far less prosaic secret programs and technology developments. Encouraging people to believe in space aliens, is a good way to pretend both to them, and to ones' enemies, that those flying craft that dart into foreign air spaces, or hover over our own lands, are actually mysterious beings from elsewhere, and not really modern spy technology. It was indeed a conspiracy, just not the EXACT conspiracy that so many people thought it was.

That's exactly what it was, the USSR first started it.

As for the 'flying craft that hover over land' and which were 'modern spy technology', presumably that's some amazing technology that has yet to be revealed to the sheeple decades years later?

For espionage in hostile technologically-equipped airspace, it would appear that either flying extremely high or flying extremely fast or flying relatively undetectably has generally been the goal, not hovering in one place.

It's clearly possible to take pictures from a stationary helicopter or jump-jet, but not generally a good idea where there's some other side likely to take violent exception to that.
A police helicopter over your own territory, or an untraceable quadcopter over a naturists's back garden might be another matter. But that's rather in a different league.
Still, I'd be interested in knowing more about these fantastic hovering spycraft from the past which are so great they are still classified, even when people use satellites or conventional aircraft or UAVs for most surveillance these days.

What evidence is there that such things actually exist?

My grandparents were scientists in the USSR and that's what they said. As have other people. Including people who helped make the stories. Some of the stuff they had is now declassified, we see it now, there is stuff that hoovers. People estimate that we are ahead by 50, 60 years in aircraft of what we see.