plenty of explanations for this map: cultural differences in how phenomena are interpreted (what americans interpret as 'aliens' may be more likely to be interpreted as 'angels' or 'spirits' or 'weird imperialist jets' or something in many other cultures without the same mass media sci fi trends in their pop culture, and maybe they are even correct to do so!), less access to electronics like cameras to record sightings, less interest among media industries of other cultures to cover such topics, less military equipment like radars and jets deployed to possibly detect phenomena, less organizations researching sightings in other countries, etc. Its silly to present this one map as some kind of 'gotcha' imo.
To add on to your first point there: There are some notions that have been put forth that suggest the UFO phenomenon is, for lack of a better term, partially psychic in nature. The idea is that whatever this is, it is something that appears to be whatever one expects it to be. Not in the sense that the phenomenon is experienced solely through a cultural lens, but that there are aspects to it that cannot be fully perceived through the human senses and thus the pattern-seeking mind fills in the blanks. The theory posits that of the slim percentage of UFO sightings that are "real" were observations of something that exists in more dimensions than just three.
I am perfectly mentally healthy and only have normal thoughts.
you're an alien. you're visiting one of the zoos. where are you spending your time? the regular people doing normal shit or the cognitively impaired albinos shooting each other and ramming each other in their little conveyances.
only reports made to an English language org based in the US. I wish people would stop posting this misleading shit, I used to think it was funny too until I learned it's meaningless and misleading and doesn't prove anything.
There's this impulse among many contemporary fiction writers to imply there's a "dead" universe out there, and to me it's both lazy (they don't have to think of convincing or at least fun aliens) and it panders to colonial mindsets about everything out there just being resource nodes to tap while Hans Zimmer BWAAAAAAAAAAMS are going off.
So fuck that. I prefer aliens in my fiction. Learn to share, or at least to behave, o whiteys on the moon.
The Aliens franchise did that, but then it got lazy and made the universe tiny and had Original Synthetic Do Not Steal be responsible for annihilating the Engineers and making the Xenomorphs.
There's this impulse among many contemporary fiction writers to imply there's a "dead" universe out there, and to me it's both lazy (they don't have to think of convincing or at least fun aliens) and it panders to colonial mindsets about everything out there just being resource nodes to tap while Hans Zimmer BWAAAAAAAAAAMS are going off.
I am less inclined to the believe the universe is "dead" and more inclined to believe it is "vast" and "inhospitable to human life". Voyager 2 took 50 years to exit the Solar System and won't get anywhere near another one before it is out of range of our instruments. We don't have anything remotely fast enough to transit between planets reliably, much less solar systems. And even if we did, the rate of communication would make any kind of human interaction sporadic at best.
So expecting to stumble on alien life any time soon feels overly ambitious. For the time being, we are alone and we have exactly one big rock where we have any chance of survival. Any exploration of deep space has to be approached with that attitude in mind. We are plunging into the Void, not sailing to a New World.
Space exploration stories in the vein of Firefly and Ad Astra and Red Mars and the early seasons of The Expanse and even shlock like Exo-Squad give us a picture of space where its humans dealing with the consequences of their own history and technology and socio-economic choices. We aren't going to find Techno-Wizards or New Edens or Space Monsters to battle and conquer. At best, we're going to find things we have ourselves created. We're going into space and we're going to evolve what we need to exist in space and then we are going to become aliens unto ourselves.
In the end, assuming we can truly get beyond Earth's embrace, that's what's going to be out there. A million million iterations of us, staring back like faces in a broken mirror.
Ghosts are cool, cryptids are cool. Aliens tend to be cringe. As silly as little green men look, anything past that tends to encourage racism and a lack of curiosity.
i'm a bit torn on aliens tbh, i did have an experience when i was younger with an alien but at the same time i feel like they're pretty cringe. when i was 14 i was approached by an alien, he was maybe 3 foot 5 and had a high pitched little voice. he was wearing this funny little hat and saying some cold cryptic message about how facts don't care about my feelings