Hoax videos and debunked stories are boring to the media.
There is a slightly more interesting meta story which only really Greenstreet has picked up, which is the current level in government that the UFO flap has reached with the AATIP/AWSAP thing, Elizondo and the Invisible College, Bigelow + Reid and Skinwalker Ranch connections.
There's some others that've covered this pretty in depth also. McGowan has made short references to it, I can't remember their name off the top but the gentleman who made all the SNA charts is on this forum too, he's been pretty on track with that. I've posted some stuff across random threads also. It's all one big social network, although there's very different parts of it that centralize around different elements. For example Elizondo and a lot of the current crowd make up a few distinct groups, they are not part of the Invisible College, although the Invisible College people that're still around make up a core of this social network and have a high gravity of influencing the others.
Understanding that is really important too because those different parts of it can have very very different goals and aims. For example, Thiel and his groups interactions are of their own interest, they do not care about the others they just so happen to be the highest gravity UAP influencers. Nick Gold, not part of the Thiel crowd but pretty close to the New Right, runs a lot of the paid media for the "whistleblower" types - also has a record supporting QAnon websites. This is also the part of the network most actively behind the "the democrats are the secret cabal! Podesta was in on it!" claims.
He's one of the reasons all these guys started showing up on the same podcasts that never really touched on these topics before. The modern whistleblower types surrounding Elizondo/Mellon/Nell have a whole stable of covert influencers also, plenty of cases of them asking people to run proxy PR for them (like the recent Alice lady) and the whole "Lue Crew" saga on Twitter. I note again here why understanding the network dynamics is also important and not just the network. This specific part of the network is a looot of guys who had exposure or training on how to play media games like this. In fact, while Elizondo is probably a lesser case, some of the mystique around his CI work is because he did CI operations, not investigations. This sounds like semantics but it's an actual distinct reference to different categories of work, different subfields basically. Mellon was the DUSD that covered IO in part, which saw him explicitly overseeing the modernization phases it went through in R&D terms throughout the early 2000s before the SOLIC role got created (he never held that one just I&S) and he later resigned.
I understand that but there's clearly a disconnect when news organizations and tv personalities are unaware of these stories being debunked for months and years and there's a cluelessness about the rigorous effort that it took to debunk them. I mean it was painful to watch the interaction between Beck and Forbes last Friday mainly because Beck had no clue what was going on. It appears they just throw the story out to get the clicks without actually digging into it. That platforming of the story I think on some level keeps the mythos going especially with the public that doesn't dive deep like the people here on Metabunk.
Yes its the 2 sides of the same coin of not "taking UFOs seriously."
The press simultaneously don't react as if the stories were true, but neither do they go looking for rational explanations or debunks, the clicks are in the "mystery" treating it as a fluff and / or courting the "controversy."
Metabunk is what happens when you crowdsource rational taking of UFOs seriously with evidential standards (with some minor banter sometimes to relieve the monotony of ADS-B tracking tic-tac's.)
These are a bit old but just responding to them since I was going through this page with the new posts. Ref on the above but it's because of paid PR honestly. There's an element of clicks that drives it, but the amount that this is all spurred by mostly paid media is really underestimated. Then add in a smaller slice of earned media through activist-journalists like Kean (that're also part of the social network). It's much less ad click revenue driving interest than PR types showing up offering paid media deals.
That is also the reason the counter content does not get much traction. We have no one doing any sort of formal PR, paid or not. Not the less to mention parts of this are actually running coordinated influence campaigns, not just quasi-forms of it but these are guys with actual training and understanding of it. Us outpacing them in media without getting equally as professional in the counter context is very unlikely and if/when it happens are incidental and relatively low gravity overall.
