UFOs Are Actually Attacking Humanity
In the movies, aliens that destroy humanity arrive in spaceships that blot out the sky. The aliens of real life are a little different. They have never once shown themselves, yet they are already eating away, bit by bit, at our time, our money, and the relationships between people. There is still no conclusive evidence that aliens have come to Earth. But the cost of searching for them, waiting for them, and trying to prove them is real.
The first thing to go is time. Play one UFO video before bed and the recommendations never end. Leaked documents, whistleblower testimony, a video that's "real this time." After one, you look for the debunking video, then the video debunking the debunk.
Say it's one hour a day. That's 365 hours a year. Even at just 15,000 won an hour, one person spends about 5.48 million won worth of time a year. If 100,000 people lived like this, the total for society would top 500 billion won. Of course, this isn't a real statistic; it converts into money the value of time that could have gone to something else. Not every hour spent watching for fun can be counted as a loss.
These days a new cost has been added. Thanks to AI, a convincing UFO video takes minutes to make. But to confirm it's fake, someone has to find the original, pin down where it was filmed, check flight paths, and analyze how the object moves. If one video takes 10 minutes to make and 5 hours to check, then making 1,000 fake videos takes under 170 hours, but checking them takes 5,000. Baseless claims are cheap to make, and other people pay to clean them up.
Alien disclosure has been "soon" for decades. If it doesn't happen this year, people wait for next year; if no evidence appears, the explanation is that the cover-up is just that thorough. If evidence appears, it proves they were right; if it doesn't, that proves it was hidden. In a structure like this, no outcome can end the belief.
Whistleblowers who say they know something big but go silent at the decisive moment build the same structure. Whether they can't speak because of the law, because of danger, or because of attention is unknown, but the very fact that they can't speak generates the next wave of attention. And the people who promised disclosure down to the date take no responsibility when they're wrong. They just name the next date.
What's interesting is that believers themselves have started to admit this fatigue. In Reddit's UFO communities, people have talked about "disclosure fatigue," and posts have appeared from people worn out by news that disclosure could be pushed back several more years. Waiting with no end in sight wears people down, and all the while time and attention keep pouring in.
There is a strange market here. Business carries on even when the promised event never happens. On Reddit, a post even appeared criticizing it under the name "the disclosure industry."
Books sell, paid memberships renew, podcast views climb, and lecture tickets and UFO travel packages sell too. There are even paid apps that claim to teach you how to make direct contact with aliens. One user posted a review saying they bought such an app, were disappointed, and got a refund. Of course, that's just one person's experience, and not everyone who spends money out of curiosity or for fun is a victim. The problem is charging people money while leading them to expect results that have never been verified.
In this market, the longer disclosure is delayed, the more there is to talk about. Why it's late, who's blocking it, what comes next. The waiting itself becomes the product.
Public money is no exception. A past U.S. UFO research program is reported to have cost about $22 million. Investigating unidentified aircraft for aviation safety and national security can't be called a waste. But if claims that have already failed verification have to be investigated again and again, that money and manpower lose the chance to be used elsewhere.
Some losses can't be counted in numbers. Once every conversation starts drifting toward aliens and government cover-ups, talks with family and friends fall out of sync. The government, scientists, and the media all become objects of suspicion, and in the end people only feel at ease among those who think the same way. They lose their real-world relationships and retreat into online communities.
The hope that aliens will save humanity creates costs too. The moment you believe that once alien technology is revealed, energy problems and climate problems will be solved in one stroke, the effort you put into problems that need solving right now shrinks. While waiting for salvation, today's work gets put off.
The irony is that real space science loses out too. While millions flock to a single video of unknown origin, the work of scientists who search for exoplanets with telescopes and analyze traces of life is pushed out of the spotlight. The side that actually has a chance of finding alien life ends up quietly buried.
Believing in aliens is not a problem in itself. The possibility of life somewhere in the universe is still open. But science cuts its costs by discarding wrong hypotheses, while a belief that never ends raises its costs the more it is disproven.
Perhaps the aliens destroying humanity are already here. Only they didn't come on a spaceship; they came riding the promise that "disclosure is coming soon." So we need to change the question. Not when will the aliens appear, but how much have we spent while waiting on the promise that they will, and whose pocket did that money go into?
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1. No Evidence, but the Time Still Disappears
The first thing to go is time. Play one UFO video before bed and the recommendations never end. Leaked documents, whistleblower testimony, a video that's "real this time." After one, you look for the debunking video, then the video debunking the debunk.
Say it's one hour a day. That's 365 hours a year. Even at just 15,000 won an hour, one person spends about 5.48 million won worth of time a year. If 100,000 people lived like this, the total for society would top 500 billion won. Of course, this isn't a real statistic; it converts into money the value of time that could have gone to something else. Not every hour spent watching for fun can be counted as a loss.
These days a new cost has been added. Thanks to AI, a convincing UFO video takes minutes to make. But to confirm it's fake, someone has to find the original, pin down where it was filmed, check flight paths, and analyze how the object moves. If one video takes 10 minutes to make and 5 hours to check, then making 1,000 fake videos takes under 170 hours, but checking them takes 5,000. Baseless claims are cheap to make, and other people pay to clean them up.
2. Disclosure Is Always "Soon"
Alien disclosure has been "soon" for decades. If it doesn't happen this year, people wait for next year; if no evidence appears, the explanation is that the cover-up is just that thorough. If evidence appears, it proves they were right; if it doesn't, that proves it was hidden. In a structure like this, no outcome can end the belief.
Whistleblowers who say they know something big but go silent at the decisive moment build the same structure. Whether they can't speak because of the law, because of danger, or because of attention is unknown, but the very fact that they can't speak generates the next wave of attention. And the people who promised disclosure down to the date take no responsibility when they're wrong. They just name the next date.
What's interesting is that believers themselves have started to admit this fatigue. In Reddit's UFO communities, people have talked about "disclosure fatigue," and posts have appeared from people worn out by news that disclosure could be pushed back several more years. Waiting with no end in sight wears people down, and all the while time and attention keep pouring in.
3. No Disclosure, but the Money Keeps Coming
There is a strange market here. Business carries on even when the promised event never happens. On Reddit, a post even appeared criticizing it under the name "the disclosure industry."
Books sell, paid memberships renew, podcast views climb, and lecture tickets and UFO travel packages sell too. There are even paid apps that claim to teach you how to make direct contact with aliens. One user posted a review saying they bought such an app, were disappointed, and got a refund. Of course, that's just one person's experience, and not everyone who spends money out of curiosity or for fun is a victim. The problem is charging people money while leading them to expect results that have never been verified.
In this market, the longer disclosure is delayed, the more there is to talk about. Why it's late, who's blocking it, what comes next. The waiting itself becomes the product.
Public money is no exception. A past U.S. UFO research program is reported to have cost about $22 million. Investigating unidentified aircraft for aviation safety and national security can't be called a waste. But if claims that have already failed verification have to be investigated again and again, that money and manpower lose the chance to be used elsewhere.
4. What We Miss While Looking at the Sky
Some losses can't be counted in numbers. Once every conversation starts drifting toward aliens and government cover-ups, talks with family and friends fall out of sync. The government, scientists, and the media all become objects of suspicion, and in the end people only feel at ease among those who think the same way. They lose their real-world relationships and retreat into online communities.
The hope that aliens will save humanity creates costs too. The moment you believe that once alien technology is revealed, energy problems and climate problems will be solved in one stroke, the effort you put into problems that need solving right now shrinks. While waiting for salvation, today's work gets put off.
The irony is that real space science loses out too. While millions flock to a single video of unknown origin, the work of scientists who search for exoplanets with telescopes and analyze traces of life is pushed out of the spotlight. The side that actually has a chance of finding alien life ends up quietly buried.
Believing in aliens is not a problem in itself. The possibility of life somewhere in the universe is still open. But science cuts its costs by discarding wrong hypotheses, while a belief that never ends raises its costs the more it is disproven.
Perhaps the aliens destroying humanity are already here. Only they didn't come on a spaceship; they came riding the promise that "disclosure is coming soon." So we need to change the question. Not when will the aliens appear, but how much have we spent while waiting on the promise that they will, and whose pocket did that money go into?
