tion of all the smart people. So I'm just going to read one part of his thread which was tremendous, and I recommend it just because I think he just does a great job of just summarizing what's going on with the whole UFO mystery.

All right, but here he restated something I guess he said before. He goes, I stand by my statement something is wildly off. And then he gives you the options for what might be happening.

A: Are pilots are crazy and or liars? So the pilots who claim they saw UFOs are either crazy or liars.

So as I go, see if any of these makes sense to you.

B: There is a psyop gaslighting our own people. You know, some kind of government plan to fool us.

C: We are too incompetent to call our own people. Wait, we are too incompetent to call our own people. Is that a typo or does that make sense to you? We're too incompetent to call our own people. I'm not sure what that one means. It must be a typo.

D: There is a secret long-standing involvement of top scientists. In other words, top scientists, they know there's something going on but they're not telling you.

E: There are some crazy seagull and mylar balloon effects. So there's just something up there but it's not UFOs.

F: A cult of UFOs has infected the Pentagon. So you know, a mental problem.

G: China and others are taking over our airspace and we're using UFOs as an excuse rather than dealing with a problem. So we're telling the public that it's UFOs when it's really Chinese technology or something.

And then I love his conclusion. All right, so this is Eric Weinstein's conclusion of all this confusion. He says, but this is so stupid to be this far in with so much... I'm embarrassed for us.

I'm with you, Eric. Same page. It's literally embarrassing. Does anybody have that feeling like as an American I'm literally embarrassed that we can't work through this? Harassment, I would say. I've removed it from my life as anything that influences me. I'm not bothered by any level of embarrassment and you shouldn't be either. If you can learn to be free of embarrassment it's like a freaking superpower.

But you know what I'm saying. It's just not a good look. You know, it doesn't bother me to my core, but you know, I'm not proud of it. Not proud of it. I am not proud of being an American based on this. You know, I am proud of being an American but not based on this story.

So I want to add a few hypotheses to his list. So he's got A through G. I didn't understand one of them. I think it's a typo. But I'll add my own take. I think it's a combination of the following. So it's not one of these things. It's a combination of all these things.

Optical illusions. We just see some things we didn't know what they were. Tech malfunctions in our sensing equipment. Or it might be just a feature slash bug that doesn't look like a malfunction. Could be confirmation bias. You know, if you're expecting to see something you see it everywhere. Could be some hoaxers. Some, not all, but some of them might be just literally hoaxers.

Then there's cognitive dissonance. You've got your grifters. You've got the effect of money that distorts everything. And then on top of that, on top of the reality or non-reality of these UFOs separately but connected, is the timing of when we learn about alleged new stuff. I believe the timing is strategic, which is independent of whether there are any real UFOs. That's a separate question. But the timing for when the news stories about UFOs, that's probably political. Not for sure, but it seems like there's always something that's embarrassing for Democrats who are in power when it comes out.

But you're working against that theory is as stuff came out during the Trump administration too, and I don't recall that that was necessarily timed to any bad Democrat news. So I don't think the hypothesis that it's always timed to cover up the news works every time. But could it have been done once? Is there any one time that somebody said, you know, this would be a good time for this story? Maybe so.

I do think that there's a possibility that the media gives it more attention when there's something that they don't want to talk about. But that doesn't mean they're necessarily doing it consciously, right? If Fox News is talking about all the bad behavior of the Democrats and they've got five good stories, you know, like Hunter's laptop and new whistleblowers, they get all that, and CNN kind of doesn't want to talk about it at all, what do they have? Right, you better talk about UFOs because you want to stay away from that stuff.

So I think it's a whole bunch of ordinary things. I do not think any of the extraordinary explanations are likely, right? So listen to how many of Eric Weinstein's potential — you know, these are ways that could be explained. How many of them are extraordinary?

All right, so just see. So I gave you a list of possibilities. They're all ordinary. Yeah, technology bugs, most ordinary thing in the world. Confirmation bias, that's so ordinary. It's the operating system of human beings. That's the most ordinary thing. You think it's there but it's not. Cognitive dissonance, all ordinary.

So everything on my list would explain everything we're seeing: hoaxers, grifters, money, media. And it wouldn't require any extraordinary anything. It wouldn't require any new introduction of any new effects. It would purely be explained by all the ordinary stuff.

But look at Eric's list. Our pilots are crazy or liars. Well if it were one or two pilots, crazy or liars would be a pretty good hypothesis. But it seems to be a lot of them, right? Or at least enough that crazy and lying is probably ruled out. That would be extraordinary.

There's a psyop gaslighting our own people. Well, psyops to gaslight us we know are common. Would you agree it's common to have psyops? But I don't think that the government would use UFOs for a psyop. That would be extraordinary. What would not be extraordinary is to say there's a let's say an anonymous source. That wouldn't be extraordinary because they do that all the time. It wouldn't be extraordinary to say there's a preprint study that says you should shove masks up your ass to stop cancer. Right, that's ordinary. Like lying in a preprint study, that's just ordinary. Or not being accurate.

How about we're too — I don't know about the incompetent one. That might be the typo.

All right, there's a secret long-standing involvement of top scientists and no top scientist has talked. Well that would be extraordinary, right? Not likely.

There are crazy seagulls and mylar balloon effects. Well that actually gets to what I was saying that there might be just a technical glitch or optical illusion, right? So I think that one's more in the ordinary category.

Where there's a cult of UFOs has infected the Pentagon. I think that's confirmation bias and the fact that UFOs are fun and everything else is less fun. If you're working in the Pentagon, name one topic that's more fun than talking about UFOs. Well we got to find if there's illegal chemical weapons. UFOs. Ah, UFOs. So you'd expect that people chase fun so they like it. So of course there are people in the military who want to talk about UFOs. UFOs are fun.

All right, China's — and I don't think it's likely that China is taking over our airspace with their advanced machines and we don't know the difference or we don't want to talk about it.

So my theory is it's ordinary. That the UFO thing is ordinary. Let me tell you why I think it's ordinary beyond the fact that all of the elements to make it happen are ordinary. The history of humankind is one hoax after another like this. You know that, right? There's never been a better time in human history where there were not multiple hoaxes that had multiple people saying they were true.

My favorite one is, was it earlier in 20th century when there were all these hoaxes about giant bones? All right, they were finding skeletons of giant bones and there were a lot of them. If you just went by how many there were and you went by how many people told you they saw it with their own eyes and you went by the media reports that they were true and you talked to the scientists who said oh yeah I saw it, you would think that was pretty true. Zero of them were true. Zero. It was just like widespread giant bones all over the place. But we don't have any. The Smithsonian has zero giant bones now.

How different is the giant bones hoax than the UFO story? What part of the giant bones hoax is not 100 percent common to the story about the UFOs? Yeah, we have better technology but does it matter if you have good technology? If you know you're seeing a Tic Tac, if you think it's a UFO, you know the humans are doing the interpreting now.

The giant bones hoax period lasted many years just like the UFOs. Now you also know I'm not going to name names but there have been some modern religions, not going to name any names, that seem to have lots of people who are direct witnesses and they'll sell out and you know hundreds, maybe millions of people join something that was born just a few hundred years ago.

So people massively believing in something that isn't true, including believing they saw it with their own eyes, they heard it, they experienced it, is very common. So if you're asking yourself what's common and what's uncommon, a gigantic hoax about UFOs that lasts for years, has hundreds of direct eyewitnesses that feel credible, has actually technology like radar that seems to be recording it, has every sign for being real and even the media suggests it's real — none of that has any validity.

We have a long history of none of that ever mattering. Do anything. It's just hoax. Now could I be wrong? I hope so. Wouldn't that be cool? I love it. Yeah, well unless you're here to kill us. But I would say if you're doing the Carl Sagan analysis, the Carl Sagan analysis is this looks like every other hoax. Why would it be different? This is the extraordinary one. Maybe.

But I would say if you're going to put odds on UFOs being real I'd say a hundred to one against it. A hundred to one against it based on the fact it looks exactly like every other hoax through modern history. They're all the same. They don't look different, you know.

So I asked this question on the service formerly known as Twitter. So I said if you want to figure out let's say the truth about climate change, the truth about climate change, and you had a choice, you could only talk to scientists, just scientists, or experts on the history of hoaxes, experts on the history of media hoaxes especially, who would give you a more useful answer? The scientists or the people who know what hoaxes look like through history?

Well I think three quarters of the people who answered that of course were biased in their answer so they said the media hoaxers. And I think that's true. I think climate change is so perfectly like a dozen other hoaxes. Now when I say hoax I don't mean that there's nothing true about it. Let me be clear. I think the basic idea that if all else was equal and you added some CO2 to a closed system it'd probably get warmer. I believe that.

Do I believe that climate change is not a problem because a million years ago we had more CO2? Does anybody think that climate change is not much of a problem because