Why does all of this alien stuff take place mostly in the USA?

TwoPiece@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 200 points –

It occurred to me while reading about UFO whistleblower news. Why do the majority of UFO things occur in the United States rather than Russia, China, and other countries?

Edit: Thank you all for answers, they're really helpful.

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Consider these possibilities:

  • USA is considerably new country and built with no distinctive, coherent ancient history and mythology. As such, its people often grab every opportunity to produce a mythology they can consider their own. It makes them perceive as unnatural/supernatural things we, citizens of old world rationalize, or brush off as of little value.
  • USA is an experiment by whatever the "aliens" are, so it's natural for them to supervise it with more interest than the rest of the world.
  • There are no aliens, it's just USA itself testing new technologies of theirs.
  • Other superpowers are very secretive by default and they simply hush-hush every sighting they can.

Adding to this:

America is often the voice of media, being the home of, Hollywood, reality TV as well as the loudest voices on the internet it's natural that we perceive that to be the home of Alien stories.

Being a 'wealthy' country: often a higher employment rate leads to an increase in extra curricular hobbies. Countries with less time to focus on things other than work will also have less time to expand on other interests. This can have a spin off effect of increased time spent day dreaming about lights in the sky.

America is a very new country. There's lots of vast open nothingness to explore. Considered a 'frontier'. The concept of unexplored territory and unclaimed space of mystery is very much more engrained in American culture, unlike say anywhere in Europe where every square inch is claimed and has a city within an hour's drive. All that empty nothingness with strange lights on the horizon can lead to more mysterious musings of what they might be.

An small criticism about your third point is the fact that the world isn't the USA and Europe. There are many areas in the world with vast open areas. I do agree that in combination with the other factors it makes sense.