The list was just so you would be more open minded, not to say all conspiracies are true.
With the fullness of time, whistle blowers, declassification of documents, etc - many things come to light.
When I was first told about the ‘Battle of Brisbane’, by a war time censor, I was like you.
As a PhD candidate I had to do Qualitative Research Methods, it opened my mind to vigorously test the evidence, not just what the previous texts/ govt rpts said.
Your father will tell you the ‘govt drip feed’ can be very unreliable and he would have been trained to develop as many different sources as possible.
One of my former mentors wrote the book Plunging Point, discussing the failure of honest Intelligence reporting, depending on set agenda’s of those above.
You’re assuming I’m not already extremely open minded. Before I started flying, I was writing for Australasian Science for ten years. The ‘Van Allen belts’ contention is not something I haven’t heard before, and it’s easy to demonstrate wrong. Also don’t assume that I’m just taking the government’s word for it. It’s not the government that’s telling us the moon landing happened, it’s independent scientists separate from the government. Science =/= politics, but people continue to conflate the two. “Oh, you think vaccines are safe and effective? GOVERNMENT SHILL!” No, I’ve read the papers from the trials conducted on them by scientists who started their projects out of their own pockets, and didn’t get a cent of government funding until Phase III trials were complete many years later.
I’m fully aware of the great whistleblowers who blew the lid on some pretty serious scandals. There are also a bunch of nutjobs that want attention so they ‘whistleblow’ some nonsense about the earth being flat, or chemtrails, or 9/11 was an inside job, and various other snake-oil sales pitches, and then they sell a book to the gullible and get rich off them.
I have a rule of thumb: what is this idea trying to sell me, and how much does it cost? Independently verifiable information doesn’t cost anything but the time you invest in learning it. The snake oil salesman always has a book for $29.99, and for just an extra $5, he’ll throw in a small vial of the secret cure to cancer that the rich have been hiding from us, and people believe it, despite how many rich people are dying of cancer, like Steve Jobs, who fell for the snake oil pitch himself and didn’t get proper cancer treatment, which is why he died. Oh the irony.
Just because one has limits to what they’re prepared to believe doesn’t mean they don’t have an open mind. I’m always open to new ideas. But if you can’t prove those ideas to me, I’ve got no reason to believe them. If those ideas contradict established knowledge, and you present them without evidence, I have every reason to reject them.
Its better than that rather than having all this information come out causing mass panic, demand for some dangerous tech to be developed to make life easier or tech that takes dangerous/rare/expensive materials/manufactuing techniques that deplete the ozone layer, rare minerals, only obtained under the only known nest of endagered hornets in an obscure rainforest. Etc, etc.
Much of this information is hidden because certain dangers are known to exsist but details of mitigation or exactly what would happen is not. Think of the recent leaps in technology since 1900. We went from crude internal combustion and steam power to now using ion engines in space. Soon we will be able to reach Mars and the astroid belts to possibly explore and even extract resources.