Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.
Personally, I’m open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.
Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.
Just to provoke discussion…
How certain are you that these “popular descriptions” didn’t inform your dreaming/night terrors?
Prior to alien abductions it was vampires. Prior to vampires it was demons. Therianthorpes have been consistent, too.
It’s common for popular media to inform people’s nightmares, and sometimes there’s a moment between waking and sleep where we’re both conscious and yet still dreaming (complete with sleep paralysis.)
The same could be said of any observation.
It looked real enough.
Also, I said “meditation”, not sleep. Remember?
(And by meditation I mean something esoteric and deep. My experience is long, the popular experience is scant and it’s so uncommon that I may as well call it magic)
The US government itself has embraced the idea of UAPs, and aliens.
That is simply false. The US government has not embraced aliens. “UAP” just means unidentified aerial phenomena and of course the US government acknowledges that they can’t identify everything in the sky, even with their fanciest of military equipment.