Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said Wednesday he believes aliens have underwater bases on Earth.
“I just think travelin’ light years, I think it happens. I think it’s possible in the vastness of God’s great universe. I mean, light years, you know, the light from those stars that we see at night left there before the time of Christ,” Burchett said, joining former Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-Fla.) One America News show, in a clip highlighted by Mediaite
In April, Burchett implied in the wake of a classified briefing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) that the government is purposefully concealing information on them from the American public.
“I think there’s a cover-up,” Burchett said at the time.
“There are tens of millions of dollars that we’ve spent investigating these things. We’ve had departments tell us that they have recovery units, but they won’t release full reports. Everything’s covered up,” Burchett added.
…
In 2023, Burchett also headed up an effort to start a UAP caucus in the House, and he is a part of a group of lawmakers from both parties that have consistently pushed for greater transparency from officials in the military on government knowledge on UAP.
Do reps who say things like this actually believe them, or are they just intentionally feeding into misinformation and conspiracy theories? Does Hanlon’s Razor apply here?
Also it’s so bizarre to me to see someone mixing that sort of hyper-religious way of speaking with conspiracy theories about aliens on Earth. It’s like hearing someone talk about alchemy and quantum chromodynamics in the same sentence, both favorably.
Religiosity and conspiratorial thinking are both based in a rejection of logic and really aren’t very far from each other.
I think they are based on wish to understand everything at once and designate clear most important components, instead of tackling the world’s complexity by the grain.
They may have internal logic, that’s how European academia evolved from something by the Church for the Church.
Rejection of logic is more of a crowd instinct present when following anything.
Say (as an example of something not conventionally religious) Soviet ideology worked more as a religion than as something it pretended to be (a scientifically substantiated path of development for our world). Conspiracies about aliens, power of water and cosmic energies, sects and such were much more popular in USSR than after it died (it would seem their boom in popularity was in the 90s, but that was just visibility due to freer environment). By the way, people sometimes say popularity of such was due to the official ideology becoming less and less believed in, while Russian Orthodox Church (kinda trying to take the place) today … is not perceived as more real than Soviet Marxism-Leninism in year 1988, yet there are no visible conspiracy movements and sect followings, will be interesting to see where this comes, I think just like Soviet conspiracy and sect movements were kinda sci-fi like, the new Russian ones will match the mindset impressed from above.
Eh, what I mean, religiosity and aliens seem to be the two things most typical for American mass culture dealing with cosmic stuff. So the guy in question is just going along with that, either because of being dumb himself, or because of appealing to dumb people in the most common symbolic language.