Death Dealer said:
The stealth fighter was operational for almost a decade before anyone in the public knew about it.
It was operational for 5 years prior to public disclosure. This is also not even close to comparable to what we are talking about here, considering that many people involved in the project would not even know why this was a "special" aircraft - people shipping fuel don't know it's being burned by a stealth fighter, the engines were ordinary aircraft engines manufactured by people who didn't know what it was being used for, and only a limited number of engineers and factory workers would even see the thing to know that it was
weird. Of these, only the engineers knew exactly why it was the shape it was. Most of it's systems were off-the-shelf parts, and the ones that were custom usually were only tangentially related to it's stealth capability (i.e. high precision inertial navigation).
Regardless of the fact that it wasn't publicly acknowledged by the government for the five years, there are several other key differences. Firstly, the idea that the government was operating stealth aircraft was widely speculated in military enthusiast circles, and some of this was almost assuredly caused by internal leaks. To give you an example, Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, published 1986 (two years prior to disclosure), featured the United States operating radar-stealthed aircraft. The same year, there was a model-aircraft set released called the "F19 Stealth Fighter". The idea that the F-19 designation (which was, in reality, skipped, most likely a design for a fighter that never left the drawing board) referred to a stealth aircraft caught on from here, and in '88 prior to disclosure we got a videogame called "F19 Stealth Fighter". Again, the same year, also prior to disclosure, they released a G.I. Joe toy called the "F19 Ghost Rider", also a stealth fighter.
Additionally, outside of military enthusiasts, the existence of a stealth fighter is of practically no interest. The public doesn't really care, and for the people involved with the project, this is an important military secret to keep.
A far better example of large scale secret keeping is the Manhattan Project, which involved far more people, and in fact was basically a city constructed for the purpose of developing and building an atom bomb. But this only lasted around half a decade as well before public disclosure, and this took place during wartime (with everybody fully onboard with the project and paranoid that letting secrets out could help the axis win).
By contrast, the existence of aliens involves orders of magnitude more people in a position to know it than either of these two projects. It is a phenomenon that is in the public's face (F117's weren't abducting people, performing flyovers and dicking around with other pilots for decades), one for which the public is extremely interested, one which involves practically every major government (UFO sightings are not USA exclusive, by any means), and one which, I must emphasize, they do not benefit by keeping secret.
Nobody claimed that governments can't have secrets, our position is rather that large scale secrets involving so many governments and so many people are practically infeasible to maintain for any notable length of time, even if they want to. The larger the conspiracy gets the harder it is to keep a lid on it. Indeed, the fact that you're claiming that there's so much evidence and that we know that they're real and that people have spoken out is direct evidence that if there was a conspiracy to hide the existence of aliens, it has failed, and given the number of people who already believe they are real, serves no functional purpose anymore, even if it once did.
I always have to laugh out loud when people try and compare the topic of UFOs/Aliens to crap like astology or ghosts. It's ridiculous. How many classified documents concerning ghosts has the NSA gone to court to protect from revealing ? Has a ghost ever been captured on multiple radars ? Has the US Govt ever scrambled fighters to intercept ghosts?
Hey, I know it's hard to respond to the central point someone is making rather than attacking straw men, but could you try? These are examples of mass delusions. They are proof that large numbers of people absolutely can be fooled, can be wrong about things regardless of how many people believe it or how strongly they believe it or how many people claim to have seen it or how much evidence they claim to have of it.
This may stun you, but it's possible to disagree with my conclusions while not being required to literally debunk everything I say. For example, what I said there was 100% true; people are frequently deluded, on large scales, and think they saw stuff that never really happened. This is true regardless of whether or not you believe aliens are visiting earth in flying saucers.
As it so happens, the United States government absolutely did investigate psychic phenomena.
That's BS. There were thousands of UFO sightings during WW2, on both sides.
ORLY? I'm not even going to bother checking to see whether your source is valid or not, or whether you're quote mining and taking things out of context or not (and believe me, I've had UFO enthusiasts tell me some bloody great whoppers in the past), because it matters little anyway since the earliest example of a flying saucer in Science Fiction appeared in 1911, and SciFi pulp was commonplace even before the second world war.
I do hope you're not deliberately obfuscating the line between "something showed up on the radar and we didn't know what it was" with "we saw aliens".
