Doug, David, you two are becoming more entertaining with each pod cast. The information, opinions and quotes are thought provoking. Most of the time I agree with what is said but sometimes I Don’t. Other times I have learned something I didn’t know or an alternate perspective was presented that I hadn’t thought of. Keep ’em coming my brothers.

Doug, you have given Cognitive Dissonance as a possible cause for the public’s non reaction to the military’s UFO disclosure. That got me thinking, why haven’t I experienced Cognitive Dissonance from disclosure. For that matter, why am I not exhibiting outraged by the admission to decades of lies. Well, the answer to that is that disclosure was no surprise. I had a suspicion that this was coming for a long time now and knowing that very little could be done to expose the truth.

It’s easiest for me to understand the ramifications of Cognitive Dissonance when I think of it this way:
Cognitive Dissonance (CD) is a theory that attempts to describes what takes place mentally in the brain when one is confronted with conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. When this happens there is a resulting feeling of mental discomfort. This leads to an alteration in one or more of one’s attitudes, beliefs or behaviors in the effort to remove the discomfort and restore balance.

So in the case of UFO disclosure and CD, unless there is a conflict between information and belief then CD does not manifest.

With respect to UFO beliefs you could roughly place people into one of 3 categories:
1. (Believes) that it is true that alien spacecraft are visiting our planet
2. (Undecided )
3. completely (Rejects) the idea.

If someone is in the Believes category then CD will not occur, if someone is Undecided then they are not likely to experience CD but if someone is in the Reject category it is more then likely that they will experience mental discomfort causing an alteration in their attitude, belief or behavior.

I have looked at some past poles addressing alien visitation. However, I recognize the flaws that are inherent in poles but I think a few examples will help to understand the point I am trying to make.
● 2001 GALLUP Pole ~ 33 % Believe – 27% Undecided – 38% Reject
● 2002 Scripps UFO Poll ~ 56 % Believe or Undecided – 44% Reject
● 2012 National Geographic survey ~ 36% Believe – 48% Undecided – 16% Reject
● 2013 HuffPost/YouGov ~ 48% Believe – 17% Undecided – 35% Reject
● 2015 Newsweek/YouGov ~ Germans 56%, Americans 54% AND British 52% Believe

The trend seems to be that only a little more than 1/3 reject the idea and yet there is a non reaction from almost everyone. CD alone cannot account for that. I see ‘Reward Stimulus’ and ‘Threat Response’ as the most effective tools used in the molding of humanities consciousness. Again I would suggest that the non reaction is evidence that the decades of conditioning on this subject has been mostly a success. The question now is what will the nameless ones do with this molded consciousness and how far will it be pushed.