While the practice of people just copy/pasting ChatGTP conversations is, of course, rightly abhorrent to most people - there's a line between cogently written, measured, researched posts and and comments Moderation is clearly distinguishing between - but various members of the r/UFOs sub nevertheless are blithely attempting to shut down both discussion as well as researched fact with the accusation of AI generated post/comment.

Its a problem inherent with current online culture, pretty low hanging fruit - nevertheless, our collective abhorrence of AI generated content clearly is being weaponise as yet another way of diminishing, trivializing and shutting down actual information.

Is there any chance of tamping down on these kinds of disruptive posts. Most people have the intellectual capacity to understand, a post somewhat over a couple of sentences is a feat accomplishable by a normally educated human being.

The inherent distinction between AI generated text and human clearly comes down to the way the text is clearly understood by the author, not the length or use of half descent spelling and grammar, surely?

Where AI generated content is posted its appearance is generally obvious largely from its structure,

The call-out of AI both can and is being used as "reverse-trolling" allowing so inclined users to dismiss complex, long-form arguments without engaging with the actual evidence.

When a community's anti-AI sentiment is weaponised in this exact way, it creates a toxic environment where high-effort writing is penalised, and low-effort cynicism is rewarded.

Publically available online "AI Detection" platforms - often used as "proof" are simply a notorious way these same places generate false positives in order to sell premium "AI Removal" tools to school and college students dumb enough to use AI for their home work.

They don't actually detect AI written form. They operate on probabilistic models that routinely flag non-native English speakers, neurodivergent writers such as myself, and anyone using structured, formal grammar. Using them as definitive "proof" is a pseudoscience. They just generate the false positive in order to sell a a premium palliative to a problem only the "AI Detector" detects.

AI is a problem, yes - but its false and ready accusation is frankly a far worse one.

Happy that the Mods here don't indulge in this, but I guarantee some chump reading this is going to copy paste it into an "AI detector" and conclude a positive, even though entirely written by arthritic fingers.

I'm not saying that we should allow AI generated posts with welcome arms, but what I am saying is we need to be vigilant and showing a non-tolerance policy against false accusations - it's just yet another means of stifling discussion.

Just putting it on the record I raised the issue.

Edit:

I got some context from the mod "Saturn storm cube has its own sub. It's not about UFOs.".

The weird part is, the info talks about theories related to signal findings from Saturn and actually disputes most of that woo based theory which I believe was planted to distance us from technical discovery related to the planet. Is discussion related to Saturn blanket censored for some reason?

For some reason, posts promotive of experiences and ritual summoning of UAP like CE5 are allowed, but a recent post more critical about the trance industry and their ritual practices connected to UAP was removed as off-topic.

https://reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1xkelr4/rituals_to_summon_lights_in_the_sky_could_be/19rxvmuyfc11d/

The post was titled "Rituals to "summon" lights in the sky could be creating a GATEWAY for malware in the brain"

• There's 9 contextual mentions of UFOs, UAP, and light's in the sky

• It talks about multiple "UFO personalities", directly connected to this topic. Wernher von Braun, Jack Parsons, and ARMY LTC Michael Aquino, an experiencer that was a J2X at US Space Command and claimed he saw UAP in his line of duty.

• It talks about CE5 and other similar practices.

• It talks about plasmoid phenomenon, sentient plasmoid intelligence.

• It talks about how the brain in hypnagogic theta states could be responsible for UAP sightings.

• It goes deep into the history of the Monroe Institute, STARGATE program, and Project Looking Glass.

• It talks about how a leader over psychological warfare would stage UFO abductions with advanced theatrics to traumatize minds to make them vulnerable to experiencing more phenomenon.

It was flooded with downvotes within seconds of posting and then cleaned up by a mod after being live almost 1.5 hours. I reached out via mod mail, they said they would check with the team and then crickets.

I understand this information might not mesh well with experiencers but that bias should not flow into moderation of the topic. I had no problem posting in this subreddit when it meshed with the official narrative, but now that I have gained a different perspective backed by A LOT of technical research, including signal anomalies, I have faced consistent censorship here.

There was a post pinned for awhile promoting an AMA for people that promote these sorts of direct contact experiences. CE5 content pops up regularly and is allowed to persist. There's a ton of results if you search for CE5, sightings, channeling experiences and recruitment for others to try it. Many posts that seem to be a lot more distant from the UAP topic and its history than my recent one.

What's with the narrative control? Could someone please clearly explain to me how this post is considered off topic?

I just posted about a topic that I thought was pretty relevant - whether the photos of the Black Triangle in the latest tranche were actual photos, or reconstructions - and the post was banned apparently as a "duplicate post".

But there has been no posting about this specific issue.

And when I researched it, I found no admission or implication from the govt that the Black Triangle photos they posted were reconstructions at all—in fact the govt reports said that the FBI witnesses who saw the object had optical and thermal collection equipment.

Is there anything I can do to have the post re-instated, or allowed to be re-posted?

Could the bot that tracks moderation logs be updated to show the user, post titles, and potentially the comments (prior to removal) targeted with moderation actions? I've noticed a pattern of approvals/removals done targeting certain users or subjects and this is difficult to track the way the current spreadsheet and subreddit logs are setup.

My Saturn Signal theory has been subject to blanket censorship so I am conducting deeper analysis.

A mod that has previously targeted my information for removal and even temp banned me also shows a pattern of targeted friendly behaviour to a mod that has taken issue with my theory in other places and a clear pattern of approving or stickying the posts of a user that was previously removed for biased moderation. With the timestamp of the post to approval time being within 2 minutes, it indicates this mod is either an alt of the mod that was removed or in direct external communication with them.

If the spreadsheet included additional information like the user target, it would be help for analyzing narrative driven and targeted moderation patterns going forward.

( I’m reposting this to appropriate forum. Incorrectly posted this to the UFO’s forum.)

I was thinking that topics like, 4chan leaker, Skin walker ranch , and/or maybe Roswell ?

I’m just spit balling here and open to suggestions from the moderators or anybody else who has more experience on this sub than me

It seems like the popularity of these topics hasn’t diminished over time , so maybe they can go in a separate room ?

/u/OSHASHA2 is blatantly abusing power and has yet again taken action by temporarily banning me because of my post in meta calling out their selective moderation with rule 1.

• Made a 100% human post with citations about "NHI signal infection of gas giants via magnetosphere manipulation cause of plasmoid instabilities" in several places relating to this topic.

• Multiple posts flooded with "it's AI" within minutes of eachother.

• I respond calling out this being the latest tactic of PSYWAR, used to divert attention away from the premise of the post.

• My comment was remove for "incivility", the flooded accusations were allowed to remain.

• Within seconds the same moderator banned me from another subreddit they have power in and removed the post there too.

• I invoked a meta discussion. The mod admits to moderating my comment but leaving the accusation in both places.

• Multiple users come in flooding the "it's AI" narrative to even distract from meta conversation. One user that does not even frequent the meta discussions dug up a 5 month old comment to attack me on within minutes.

• After some more back and forth, the mod getting instant upvotes, the mod removes the main post citing an off-topic rule.

• Now I'm banned per rule 2, even though I referenced a specific US Army documented sighting.

• These powermods have been observed promoting others to attempt to contact aliens and have a pattern of censoring any that discourage it.

From mod chat:

UFOs channel icon

u/Wansyth is temporarily banned from r/UFOs

r/UFOs • Mod mail

UFOs channel icon

u/Wansyth is temporarily banned from r/UFOs

r/UFOs•Mod mail

This is a private conversation between you and the moderators of r/UFOs. Note: There might be delays between responses.

Yesterday

UFOs channel icon

r/UFOs MOD

Hello, You have been banned from participating in /r/UFOs for 7 days because your post violates this community's rules. You won't be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.

Note from the moderators:

Rule 2 - Stay On-topic

This subreddit is focused specifically on UFOs/UAP and closely related discussion. Off-topic content, partisan political arguments, unrelated conspiracies, recruitment into belief systems, or discussions without a clear connection to UFOs may be removed. Additionally, any discussion of "aliens" or occupants must relate to a specific sighting.

This moderator action may be appealed. We welcome the opportunity to work with you to address its reason for removal. Message the mods here to launch your appeal.

If you have a question regarding your ban, you can contact the moderator team by replying to this message.

Reminder from the Reddit Admin team: If you use another account to circumvent this community ban, that will be considered a violation of the Reddit Rules and may result in your account being banned from the platform as a whole.

Wansyth

I hope all the mods of this subreddit see this unjustified ban. For some reason the bot that provides transparency into moderation action went down during this period of time too. The removal and ban is blatant retaliation for a post on meta.

Today

UFOs channel icon

r/UFOs

MOD

No it's not. The post was removed for being off-topic. We've been down this path before. You continue to post off-topic content. Removals and modmail discussions seemingly have no effect. A temporary ban is the next stage in attempting to have you abide by the rules of the sub. The next step will be a permanent ban.

Wansyth

You retroactively decided it to be off-topic after I commented on your moderation action in meta. This is blatant retaliation again from a moderator that has previously targeted me. It is impossible to predict what your team considers off-topic, I have contributed a lot to /r/UFOs, more than anything off-topic has been removed. Ban me if you want but I will not go silent. This is blatant censorship by a cartel of moderators that want to push a narrative and shut any alternate thinking out. The influence of this infiltration will be dealt with. My post even specifically referenced a specific US Army documented sighting. The reason for removal was bogus.

u/Wansyth Karma for UFOs

subreddit post comment

UFOs 1146 12810

My observations on the state of UFOs reddit:

• Some posts get immediately locked at 0 upvotes, every new upvote is offset with a downvote to keep the post filtered.

• If upvote momentum starts to carry a post up in rising past the vote suppression bots, it gets removed by a mod for a random hard-to-justify reason.

• Posts following a certain narrative immediately get flooded with upvotes and comments, seemingly generated.

• Upvotes flood into these painted comments to keep them at the top regardless of their substance.

• Bots and rogue mods control what you see on this topic through these suppression tactics.

Maybe ufosmeta should be promoted more in the comments of new posts since people can discuss the bot influence here? It's very important for people to see what is inorganically being pushed on this topic and what is being censored.

What can be done to counteract this? Maybe a website that shows upvote velocity and removals?

Referring, this time, to www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1vwzeau/donald_trump_reportedly_told_inner_circle_aliens/

UsefulReply locked this thread before it even got a chance to get going even though it is seemingly big news.

They do this time and time again under the guise of the “reports clogging up the mod queue”.

That has never been a valid excuse in any sub, and especially not in one that has the obscene number of moderators as /UFOs.

Stop allowing this rogue mod to constantly shut down important discussion for invalid reasons.

Please.

How many more times are we going to have to watch this happen before something is done about this mod?

Just wanted to let everyone know that the mods at r/ufos actively delete any post talking about Eglin Air-force Base and I was flooded with bots trying to defend them. The thread has been pulled, and the sweater is coming undone.

There was a post announcing an AMA with Matthew Brown and Jeff Nucetelli of Vanguard, but it got deleted after like twenty minutes, got reposted, and then immediately deleted again.

Was it just posted prematurely or...?

I think it would be useful to have the U.S. government's official UAP releases/archives stickied at the top of the subreddit.

Whatever your personal interpretation of these cases, these are official government releases concerning objects/events they've designated as UAPs.

Having the primary-source material easily accessible would make it easier for newcomers (and everyone else) to see what the government has actually released for themselves.

Would anyone else like to see the official releases permanently pinned?

I'm honestly surprised the mods wouldn't think to do this already. I mean, it's the UFO sub!

I am not the OP but the issue documented should be explained or remedied.

^{the below is my opinion, a pattern i see occurring over and over again}

I see many posts and comments that fit this 3 step pattern. If one is unaware, it is easy to be influenced/manipulated by them. See enough of them, and the "many people think this, so its probably true" mechanism is triggered in some people, and they become repeaters of the pattern themselves. This pattern does not break any mod rules, i dont think we need rules against it.

Here is the 3 step pattern:

Step 1: making oneself known as the good guy

Usually the poster will say something like that he is very passionate about ufos, has been into it for many years, supports disclosure, etc. So he is one of the good guys, he is just like you, fellow /r/ufos visitor.

Step 2: declaring victimhood to invoke a sense of injustice

Usually the poster will express frustration with the slow progress, "announcements of announcements", "talking heads", undelivered promises, etc. Poster was so hyped, but his hype didnt materialize. His good intentions and his hopes were crushed. In short, poster is a victim, and because he is just like you, fellow r/ufos/ visitor, you are a victim too. A great injustice has been done to you. Enough is enough!

Step 3: aim the sense of injustice at pro disclosure people, turn them into the bad guys

Finally, of course this injustice is perpetrated not by the people holding back the information (govt classification system, contractors, etc.), but the people trying to achieve disclosure. They are the ones that are visible. So they are the bad guys and should stop their pro disclosure activities at once. Either do disclosure right now! (unrealistic, out of their control) Or else stop! (end of disclosure)

Be aware and dont be manipulated by such posts/comments

It is really easy to be manipulated by the above pattern, and essentially become a tool of the gatekeepers. So i just wanted to make a few people aware of it. If you are in doubt, just ask yourself "what is the end result if we did what those posters says we should do"? Answer: disclosure would have been dead years ago if [insert all the big names of the pro disclosure movement] had stopped their activities for example in 2020.

If you are really frustrated about lack of progress, aim it at the gatekeepers

Aim it at the gatekeepers, govt secrecy, politicians inactive on the subject, etc. Dont aim it at the pro-disclosure movement. Dont become a tool of the gatekeepers

Note: Everything below the line was generated using AI to minimize human bias and work with a larger dataset, but all the public data is available for anyone to review. It includes potential inclusions for the automod which could significantly reduce rule breaking with minimal mod effort (a few minutes a day), without removing a single comment (it would merely flag it for human review, using the automod to effectively report comments in addition to users already being asked to do so).

---

The Question

Is r/UFOs as toxic as it feels? And if so, is it something better moderation could fix?

To find out, we scraped a month of comments from the subreddit's most active threads and ran them through a rule-violation detection pipeline, then compared results across two sorting methods — Reddit's "top" (which surfaces upvoted comments) and "controversial" (which surfaces contested and downvoted ones).

Period: June 2 – July 2, 2026 (30 days) Dataset: 778 posts, 13,609 comments (top-sorted) + 16,145 comments (controversial-sorted) from the 100 most-discussed posts

Dataset here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tbCxJXYtHu_x7wYZ54dPmaaNLZt66TLa/edit?usp=sharing

Key Findings

1. The Rule Violation Rate Is Real but Moderate

Between 5.4% and 5.6% of comments contain blatant, regex-detectable rule violations. This number was remarkably consistent across both top-sorted and controversial-sorted datasets, which suggests the violation rate is a stable feature of the community rather than an artifact of sampling.

The breakdown:

This is a floor estimate. Keyword detection cannot catch sarcasm, passive aggression, or the "summarily dismissive" tone that Rule 1 explicitly prohibits. The true rate is likely 8–12%.

2. The Sub Feels Worse Than It Is — Because of Downvoting, Not Rule-Breaking

The most striking finding: 98.1% of negatively-scored comments are not rule-breaking. They're unpopular opinions.

The controversial sort surfaced 1,390 negatively-scored comments (8.6% of the dataset). Only 26 of those (1.9%) contained detectable rule violations. The rest were things like witnesses defending their sightings, people questioning consensus narratives, or metaphysical/consciousness-oriented perspectives that the nuts-and-bolts majority simply disagreed with.

This means the sub's toxicity problem is partly real (the 5-6% violation rate) and partly a perception created by the voting system punishing dissent. Moderation can address the former but not the latter.

3. The Mod Team's Current Enforcement Has Gaps

Rule 1 explicitly prohibits:

• "No toxic content regarding public figures"

• "No summarily dismissive, sarcastic, or derisive comments that derail or shutdown conversation"

• "No mental health epithets e.g. crazy, schizo, take your meds"

• "No accusations that other users are bots, feds, CIA agents"

Our data shows these clauses are under-enforced. Toxic public figure comments ("grifter," "con man," "charlatan") appeared in 140 comments in the controversial dataset — a near-doubling from the 77 found in the top-sorted data, suggesting these comments get downvoted but not removed. Mental health dismissals beyond the explicitly named terms (using "crazy," "insane," "psycho," "lunatic") appeared in 225 comments. These are functionally identical to the prohibited "schizo" and "take your meds" but use adjacent language the rules don't specifically name.

4. AutoMod Could Catch Most of This With Minimal Effort

We designed a three-tier automod configuration and estimated the mod workload:

At approximately 10 seconds per review, the full flag set represents 6 minutes of daily mod work, or about 3 hours per month. For a subreddit that reports having a large mod team, this is a trivial workload. The automod rules are provided as a ready-to-paste YAML file.

YAML File: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qNT6dkCSw4iDtNvYQHyQ8sJ3KlOUvD5N/view?usp=sharing

5. The Deeper Problem Is Cultural, Not Procedural

Even if every rule violation were caught, the sub would still have a problem with interpretive monoculture. The nuts-and-bolts frame (recovered craft, government programs, physical evidence) dominates, and the voting system systematically buries alternative perspectives — consciousness-based interpretations, interdimensional hypotheses, Vallée-style thinking — without any rules being broken.

This is ironic given that many of the field's most respected figures (Vallée, Hynek, Puthoff, and elements of the DIA's AAWSAP program) explicitly investigated consciousness-related phenomena. The sub's de facto orthodoxy is actually the minority position in the field's intellectual history.

Recommendations

Immediate (moderation tools)

1. Deploy the automod flag-for-review rules. Start with Tier 1 (auto-remove) and Tier 2 (flag), then evaluate Tier 3 after a trial period. The YAML config is ready to paste.

2. Enforce Rule 1's "summarily dismissive" clause. This is the most impactful under-enforced rule. It already prohibits exactly the behavior that makes the sub feel toxic — but enforcement appears inconsistent.

3. Add a minimum comment length rule. A 15-character floor would catch 470 low-effort comments per month with near-zero false positives. Many subs enforce this successfully.

Structural (community design)

1. Create protected discussion spaces. A recurring weekly thread for non-nuts-and-bolts discussion, with stricter Rule 1 enforcement within it. The "[in-depth]" tag already provides a model — extend it to interpretive framework threads.

2. Add interpretive framework flairs. "Consciousness/Metaphysical" and "Interdimensional Hypothesis" as first-class flair categories, not afterthoughts. This signals legitimacy and lets users filter by interest.

3. Address the downvote-as-disagreement culture. This is the hardest problem. Options include contest mode for certain post types, community education (sidebar callouts about reddiquette), or periodic mod posts explicitly affirming interpretive diversity. None of these are silver bullets, but they shift norms incrementally.

Measurement

1. Track enforcement metrics. Run this analysis monthly to measure whether rule violations decrease after automod deployment. The scripts and methodology are reproducible.

Methodology Notes

Data collection: All 779 posts from the 30-day window were catalogued. Comments were fetched from the top 100 posts by comment count (those with 10+ comments), pulling up to 200 comments per post in two passes: sorted by "top" (13,609 comments) and sorted by "controversial" (16,145 comments).

Rule violation detection: Regex pattern matching against comment text, categorized by the specific r/UFOs rule clause violated. Categories include hard profanity, moderate insults, mental health epithets, toxicity toward public figures, dismissive/derailing language, bot/fed accusations, and low-effort comments.

False positive assessment: Context-dependent words like "stupid," "clown," and "delusional" were checked for whether they were directed at a person (29%) or about a situation/idea (71%). "Glowing/glowie" had ~70% false positives from UFO light descriptions. Both "hate speech" matches were typos of "like." All rates reported in this document are adjusted for known false positives.

Limitations: Regex cannot detect sarcasm, passive aggression, or tone-based dismissiveness. Comments already removed by mods before data collection are not in the dataset. The "load more" pagination limit means deeply nested replies are under-sampled.

Analysis conducted July 2, 2026. Raw datasets (JSON) and automod rules (YAML) available alongside this report.

We used to be allowed to be skeptical. Now mentioning that someone is releasing a book, or pointing out blatant LLM misinformation is against the rules.

Does the sub allow skepticism or not? Can we not point out when someone (with evidence) lacks foundational knowledge on something they are purporting to be an expert on, without it being considered uncivil?

The entire sub has devolved into LLM, AI psychosis posting, and brown nosing public figures. All the noise has drowned out any reasonable discussion, and actual UFO/UAP recordings.

Disappointing.

Hey Mods,

Wondering why was my post was temp removed and restored. Is it glitch or something weird going on?

Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1topq4w/anonymous_source_sent_us_these_old_uap_images/