Between Disclosure and Conspiracy: The Transparency Effect on r/UFO and r/UAP Subreddits

While there exists genuine scientific inquiry seeking to understand Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), the lore of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) is deeply intertwined with narratives deliberately crafted to mislead, obfuscate, and manipulate public perception with a community historically targeted by sustained disinformation campaigns. In this study, we explore the public reception regarding UAP disclosures against the historical context of government disinformation and obstructive information flows. To this end, we retrieved the posts and comments featured in the UAP and UFO Reddit communities and modeled the data by constructing a timeline of governmental and intelligence announcements, leaks, and reports, but also congressional and senate committee hearings, special news reports, and DOD AARO public statements about UAPs. Using time series analysis techniques, we modeled this data to test whether government direct engagement with the topic has tangible effects in subsiding disinformation concerns and conspiratorial narratives within these communities. Our results show that the transparency effect driven by government disclosures effectively counters the erosion of trust fueled by conspiratorial narratives. We conclude by outlining the limitations and challenges embedded in the very idea of disclosure, a term that is ideologically and politically inflected and calls for further studies in this area.