The next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on conspiracy theories, with a focus especially on UFOs and UAPs. We start with an introduction by Marco Bastos. This has produces several hypotheses: especially, about UFOs as cover for military black ops; or about UFOs as a real, alien phenomenon. This hardly matters any more, though, because UFO claims also feed into an arms race in space technologies.
The rise of conspiracy theories also contributes to democratic backsliding: they tie into perceptions of a lack in transparency in democratic processes, especially in the US, and have also infiltrated debates in US Congress and other contexts. This study draws on some 63,000 threads from Reddit’s /r/UFO and /r/UAP subreddits from 2014 to 2024, filtered and coded via LLMs. Major Senate hearings and other public events reliably increased the volume of such discussions, of course; this is a kind of transparency effect, as public hearings and disclosures of previously secret information give people the liberty to discuss UFO and UAP sightings that are otherwise shrouded in secrecy.
