Alora Fane

According to a post on Reddit 7 years ago, aliens will make some kind of contact (or something) on the 18th of July 2021, which is a couple of days from now. But will they??

I've written about this in at least one other post about UFOs not too long ago, but since the date's imminent now, I wanted to make a note of it again.

To summarise what happened, seven years ago a person on Reddit - using a throwaway account called Throawaylien [sic] - wrote some intriguingly detailed accounts of his experiences being abducted multiple times over the course of his life, talking with the aliens and even (kind of) befriending a pair of them. Notably, this wasn't posted in a UFO-related subreddit to attract attention to himself; it was written as a response to an AskReddit thread asking about abduction experiences. Most of his details were provided in responses to other people's questions.

∞ (Link to a post with all of his comments and various other resources.) ∞

He said that the aliens talked about something happening on the 18th of July 2021; something like... one group has been overseeing the Earth for several thousand years, but they'll be leaving and another lot of aliens - which they were at war with? - will be taking over, which may or may not lead to contact or enormous societal shifts. He mentioned this seven years ago, but it was mostly just forgotten among all the other world-changing prophecies people make all the time (and which never come true).

As 2021 arrived and progressed, though, UFOs started gaining mainstream attention. UFO-related communities and figures became very active, apparently pushing for disclosure. A US government report came out confirming that UFOs are at least real (if not what they are or where they're from), which is a big shift from the denial and ridicule that's surrounded the topic for decades. The strange timing caused a lot of growth on UFO-related subreddits, and some of them revisited Throawaylien's account because of the remarkable coincidence of the predicted date.

Then Throawaylien came back, continuing his story from seven years prior, with a much darker tone. He seemed very mentally unwell, but the details he gave didn't clash with what he'd said before. He claimed the 18th of July date was still going to happen, though he wasn't sure exactly what might happen. Just that we'd know. He then deleted his account.

His reemergence was met with hostility and rejection by the looking-a-fool-fearing majority, but a smaller number of curious, sympathetic people gathered together and formed ∞ a community ∞ to discuss his story. It grew; currently it has over 11,000 members since its start in April. The prevailing attitude there is that the whole thing is just a 'larp', but that it's more enjoyable to remain curious, to wonder, than it is to smugly dismiss. "Probably nothing will happen, but I kind of hope it does" or "but what if it does?" This is my attitude towards the whole thing too, so it's been really pleasant just reading people's speculation and discussions and the fairly regular posts about how it's such a nicer community than the more toxic UFO ones.

When the 18th passes, they're saying they absolutely won't move the goalposts - they'll shut down the community - but they've already created another less specific one which they hope will have a similar welcoming-of-wonder atmosphere. I hope that too! I've subscribed to it, though I'll only be lurking.

There have also been a lot of sceptical dissections and doubts of Throawaylien's posts and overall story, but they've yet to definitively prove that the whole thing is a hoax (or 'larp'). A handful of other people have shown up making similar bold claims about alien contact, but they were unmasked (under threat of doxxing in one case), fairly quickly, which makes the mystery of Throawaylien all the more fascinating.

Some of the analyses have been particularly interesting. Throawaylien claimed to have been abducted regularly for most of his life - every few years - and gave a few dates spread across various comments, not in chronological order, which ∞ this person created a timeline of ∞. They apparently add up, suggesting the whole timeline was either planned in advance, or it actually happened.

An obvious thought is that he's telling what he believes to be the truth, even if it's at odds with consensual reality. It's possible, but he doesn't come across as scattered or chaotic as someone with schizophrenia. Returning seven years after his original claims to support them seems to clash with that too. It's also an oddly long time to keep up a charade (though it'd be less odd than it being true, I suppose).

There was also ∞ this person ∞ (link is to all their comments) who came along claiming to have also been abducted by the same set of aliens, due to eerie similarities between their experiences. Perhaps someone with more desire to stretch their creative writing legs than moral reluctance to deceive, or - if the whole account is true - it'd make sense that someone else who'd been through it might appear. Some details are notable, like Throawaylien describing the aliens' small ships like this:

The little ships are the shape of hot dogs, sort of. Boy, this sounds stupid, but kind of like VW microbus vans, but a little bit bigger. The outside is a kind of gun metal blue that looks wet, glassy.

While the other person describes them like this:

No, the crafts I've seen weren't really like tic-tacs (they were flattened on the bottom). It's a ridiculous comparison but imagine like a Twinkie shaped craft, very shiny and dull blue / black depending on how the light catches it.

That's either an impressive display of comprehension skills combined with creativity, or two people using different comparisons to attempt to describe the same object.

Or both authors are the same person who's kept an elaborate plan of their lies.

So the 18th is just a couple of days off now. Do I think anything will happen? Probably not, but the anticipation that something might has been electric recently, and I appreciate going along with the ride for that alone.

Are you familiar with John Titor? That was a guy who claimed in depth to be a time traveller from the future, and the overall feeling of the narrative was very similar to this one. I think that eventually the writer was found to be some lonely nerdy guy or something - of course - just doing it to add some magic to his otherwise miserable life, and chances are this is pretty much the same scenario.

Still, it's made my miserable life a little bit more interesting over these past few weeks, so even if there's zero payoff, I'm still glad I followed the story and the discussions around it.

Or who knows, maybe he's telling the truth and our lives as we know them will be over on the weekend. I don't think our brains can even process such an idea!

Even if this particular story turns out to be nothing, we do seem to be in the middle of a years-long disclosure, so it'll be interesting seeing how drastically our views about this stuff might shift over the coming decade.

6 COMMENTS

astralwolf92~3Y

It'll likely be like the mk ultra reveal, nothing substantial

Tama_Yoshi82~3Y

This is probably annoyingly tangential, but I've discussed with a philosophy major recently, and he brought up the concept of "Rational Quotient" or RQ; I looked into it, because I am generally skeptical of methods to categorize intelligence. But while reading on it, I found a lot of interesting ideas of how to conceive of intelligence (specifically, as independent of IQ). The specific researchers on RQ talked specifically of conspiracy theorists that formed groups of UFO researchers by specifically selecting them for their high IQ, which then leads to the question; why would these researchers spend so much effort in something which leads so little discernible result, especially if they are so "intelligent".

The wikipedia article puts it in a way I found fascinating; it's not meant as a criticism of those people in the sense that they are "clearly wrong"; the existence of UFOs or extra-terrestrial life interacting with mankind is essentially unfalsifiable, so calling it "wrong" would be technically incorrect. The curiosity is more about how these kinds of people come to select what they want to investigate, despite the lack of "concrete" evidence in favor of their hypothesis.

The RQ theory doesn't appear to be very elaborated (there are tests for it, although they are only accessible via academic platforms), but two concepts caught my attention, which I understood as essentially the same thing: Mindware, and the Algorithmic Mind. Mindware is described specifically in the context of people with irrational ways of perceiving logic, for instance devout religious people who associate all negative experiences (including disproving evidence) as coming from The Devil (or something). The researchers call this "Infected Mindware", which I've (at a high-level) understood as "improper 'algorithms,' installed within the algorithmic mind" and the algorithmic mind is conceived as a subset of Type-2 systems of cognition (being the effortful, conscious mode of critical thinking).

The idea is appealing to me, because it seems like people rationalize things in very specific ways sometimes, and I like the idea that some people learn "logic" in a specific way, and the "Mindware" installed in people's minds provide logical tools (or sometimes, pitfalls), and the hope of the researchers is to be able to uninstall the infected mindware somehow, whereas we can install useful philosophical logic tools to aid general thinking.

If it feels like I'm going on a limb to talk about Rationality, it's because I am! I love talking about it. BUT it's ALSO because I wanted to go on ANOTHER limb (lots of limbs! True body horror!) about a psychiatrist I've taken notice of recently, who seems to specialize in CBT with Buddhist/Hinduist aspects of Spirituality and meditation. It might be your thing; there's even a long video where he talks to a female streamer about her history of debilitating social anxiety [LINK] . Seeing applied psychology (and I presume many aspects of CBT) - even though this is explicitly not therapy and is clearly disclaimed as being equivalent to therapy - I really like how DrK traces the history of how to process emotions, and our emotional instincts (and sometimes our emotional instincts on how to suppress our emotions).

It almost sounds like people install, or learn, Mindware that defaults to certain attitudes towards emotions, like knee-jerk reactions learned from trauma which warp further perceptions of a certain emotion or stimuli. A lot of DrK interviews involve men with Alexithymia (difficulty to understand one's own emotions) which is definitely interesting, as some of these people seem to be completely unable to even comprehend their own feelings. I'm not very emotive, but even I find that perplexing!

DrK's approach revolves around observing one's emotions within one's bodily senses, and reinterpreting those bodily senses via meditation, like relearning the emotional mindware. I have some potential disagreements with DrK although it's difficult to argue them since he's clearly more of an expert on the subject than I am. Overall, I think he's pretty interesting.

That was a tangent and a half! Hopefully that didn't feel too shoe-horned in. I had interesting things to share!!!1!

The wikipedia article puts it in a way I found fascinating; it's not meant as a criticism of those people in the sense that they are "clearly wrong"; the existence of UFOs or extra-terrestrial life interacting with mankind is essentially unfalsifiable, so calling it "wrong" would be technically incorrect. The curiosity is more about how these kinds of people come to select what they want to investigate, despite the lack of "concrete" evidence in favor of their hypothesis.

The RQ theory doesn't appear to be very elaborated (there are tests for it, although they are only accessible via academic platforms), but two concepts caught my attention, which I understood as essentially the same thing: Mindware, and the Algorithmic Mind. Mindware is described specifically in the context of people with irrational ways of perceiving logic, for instance devout religious people who associate all negative experiences (including disproving evidence) as coming from The Devil (or something). The researchers call this "Infected Mindware", which I've (at a high-level) understood as "improper 'algorithms,' installed within the algorithmic mind" and the algorithmic mind is conceived as a subset of Type-2 systems of cognition (being the effortful, conscious mode of critical thinking).

The idea is appealing to me, because it seems like people rationalize things in very specific ways sometimes, and I like the idea that some people learn "logic" in a specific way, and the "Mindware" installed in people's minds provide logical tools (or sometimes, pitfalls), and the hope of the researchers is to be able to uninstall the infected mindware somehow, whereas we can install useful philosophical logic tools to aid general thinking.

If it feels like I'm going on a limb to talk about Rationality, it's because I am! I love talking about it. BUT it's ALSO because I wanted to go on ANOTHER limb (lots of limbs! True body horror!) about a psychiatrist I've taken notice of recently, who seems to specialize in CBT with Buddhist/Hinduist aspects of Spirituality and meditation. It might be your thing; there's even a long video where he talks to a female streamer about her history of debilitating social anxiety https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n6lDNacfk0 . Seeing applied psychology (and I presume many aspects of CBT) - even though this is explicitly not therapy and is clearly disclaimed as being equivalent to therapy - I really like how DrK traces the history of how to process emotions, and our emotional instincts (and sometimes our emotional instincts on how to suppress our emotions).

It almost sounds like people install, or learn, Mindware that defaults to certain attitudes towards emotions, like knee-jerk reactions learned from trauma which warp further perceptions of a certain emotion or stimuli. A lot of DrK interviews involve men with Alexithymia (difficulty to understand one's own emotions) which is definitely interesting, as some of these people seem to be completely unable to even comprehend their own feelings. I'm not very emotive, but even I find that perplexing!

DrK's approach revolves around observing one's emotions within one's bodily senses, and reinterpreting those bodily senses via meditation, like relearning the emotional mindware. I have some potential disagreements with DrK although it's difficult to argue them since he's clearly more of an expert on the subject than I am. Overall, I think he's pretty interesting.

That was a tangent and a half! Hopefully that didn't feel too shoe-horned in. I had interesting things to share!!!1!

purplerabbits148~3Y

The 7 years between posting back then and now is certainly a really long time to have a "LARP" setup. I have watched a lot of Night Mind, a youtuber that talks about ARG's(Alternate Reality Games.) In ARG's, there is a blending of reality and the supernatureal/sciencfiction/creepypasta/alternate history, in which a story is told that the audience can influence the outcome of the story. There's an increase in popularity of ARG'S in recent years. In ARG's it's not unusual for years to go on in-between updates and it's kind of the expected norm nowadays for long gaps to happen after a strong start.

So theoretically, the reddit user could have been an ARG waiting for the right time, however there is some doubt because ARG's need a central hub to gather all the clues and have a central place where people can communicate their findings amongst players of the ARG. And with the deletion of the account, that puts doubt into it being and ARG or a larp.

Since I play dnd, I've heard about larps, but a "Live Action Role Play" seems pretty hard to set up since there is so much prep work needed to make it function. And again, the guy deleted his account how can he direct where people should go if there's no central director/DM for a larp?

I personally would love if this were an ARG or a larp, because the story on how they got it all to work would be really fascinating, because it is just that unbelievable for it to be an ARG.

If the iens turn out to be real then I am all fown, yet slightly scared for the future, but it will be a really interesting future.

But as you said, probably nothing will happen, but it is pretty cool how people come together to speculate on what may happen and what it could mean.

So theoretically, the reddit user could have been an ARG waiting for the right time, however there is some doubt because ARG's need a central hub to gather all the clues and have a central place where people can communicate their findings amongst players of the ARG. And with the deletion of the account, that puts doubt into it being and ARG or a larp.

Since I play dnd, I've heard about larps, but a "Live Action Role Play" seems pretty hard to set up since there is so much prep work needed to make it function. And again, the guy deleted his account how can he direct where people should go if there's no central director/DM for a larp?

I personally would love if this were an ARG or a larp, because the story on how they got it all to work would be really fascinating, because it is just that unbelievable for it to be an ARG.

If the iens turn out to be real then I am all fown, yet slightly scared for the future, but it will be a really interesting future.

But as you said, probably nothing will happen, but it is pretty cool how people come together to speculate on what may happen and what it could mean.

Tobias 1115~3Y

ARGs typically involve some kind of call to action though, don't they? Some clear puzzles to solve, or hints about where to look to solve them, and what you might find if you do. This was just some guy replying about his abduction experiences in an AskReddit thread - like all the other commenters - and didn't seem to be asking anything of anyone, or even hinting at any prize for solving anything. It's all very odd! I suppose we'll find out tomorrow, at any rate.

Live Action Role Play is what I understood 'larp' as, though it seems due to language evolution it's come to mean just any internet hoax story, it looks like.

purplerabbits148~3Y

The most common ARG trait is that there is a call to action, but not all of them do. For example, there was a twitter ARG from the user @TheSunVanished where they tweet about the situation about their version of Earth that suddenly had the sun go out. There were no puzzles involved, but the user will like comments that give advice on how to survive or where people ask queations about the location and give clarifying answers. The series technically is still hoing, though seems that it will be getting a video (series) adaptation, so the series may end as a show in the future. People call TheSunVanished and ARG because the setting takes place in an alternate reality, and that there is a way for the audience to interact with the game master.

As you said the reddit poster was a guy talking and replying like a normal redditor without an obvious prize. Which does lead to doubt it is an ARG. But, not all ARG's follow the same formula. Kanye Quest was an rpg maker game that had an ARG element that was so hidden that it took until recently for people to figure out there was some weird cult ARG element in there that is kind of now dead because it took years for people to find it and that the DM seems to have moved on.

Huh, I did not know there were other evolutions of the usage of the word larp. The more you know.

As you said the reddit poster was a guy talking and replying like a normal redditor without an obvious prize. Which does lead to doubt it is an ARG. But, not all ARG's follow the same formula. Kanye Quest was an rpg maker game that had an ARG element that was so hidden that it took until recently for people to figure out there was some weird cult ARG element in there that is kind of now dead because it took years for people to find it and that the DM seems to have moved on.

Huh, I did not know there were other evolutions of the usage of the word larp. The more you know.

Astreon152~3Y

Well, we're the day after.

If contact was made, I don't know about you, but I sure wasn't kept in the loop.