Hardcore UFO enthusiasts share troubling elements with other conspiracy communities.
, you’ve listened to your friend’s story about that weird light she saw. “Lots of conspiracy theories, you get redpilled into. You’re waking up into a world you didn’t know existed,” says West, referring to the red pill inthat shows Neo the true nature of reality. “But everybody grows up knowing about UFOs and the ideas of flying saucers. The redpilling doesn’t require very much.” It’s more like a pink pill, he quips.
In this universe, you are, says Cogswell, “showered with love,” when you adhere to the right beliefs, “and then showered with hate when you go against the group,” reinforcing a common and conformist view of all-things-saucer. Nothing ever bonded anyone better than being covalently downtrodden.For West, the unwillingness to truly consider other perspectives is troubling.
And then there’s this statement from Elizondo himself, speaking about his efforts to extricate UFO information from government vaults. “The only way this is gonna stop is, like I said before, if someone puts a bullet in my head,” he said in a“…I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit back and let a bunch of bureaucrats, you know, abscond with that responsibility to be fair and transparent with it with the American people.
The violence is obviously the eyecatcher there, but conspiratorial thinking has, IRL, also led people to avoid vaccines, stalk the parents of school-shooting victims, troll climate scientists, and spend hard-earned money buying equipment to prove Flat Earth theory right.Scholars often study the individual factors that lead people down those rabbit holes.