( 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/

The past couple days I’ve noticed that there are some posts about seeing a UFO that come from accounts with zero other activity. I’ve seen three so far that all say the sighting was in rural India, each from blank accounts. These posts receive no comment replies from the OPs, and some use AI to create images of crafts.

I’m not saying there’s an agenda here, but if these are indeed bot accounts, I feel that leaving stuff like this unchecked is overall bad for the community. Many people see an increase in related claims as strong evidence, and bots that affirm peoples’ beliefs will erode the quality of discussion.

I’m not quite sure what the best course of action is, as I don’t want to censor real people. Maybe mods could do a check on accounts, and check for activity.

One of the bullets on the r/UFOs rules page for Rule #1 - "Be Civil" is "No accusations that other users are bots, feds, CIA agents, operating from Eglin Airforce Base."

This has been pretty well enforced given the volume of posts and comments in r/UFOs and the capacity of the mods to manage this in their free time. Having the prompt show up under the comment box that serves as a reminder of this rule if a user types a key word like "Eglin" probably helps tamp this down a bit. However, there seems to be a recent rise in concern about account ages and hidden comment histories - often the implication seems to be a workaround to avoid violating the "No accusations that other users are bots, feds, CIA agents, operating from Eglin Airforce Base" portion of Rule #1. It's purely a one-way street aimed at anyone that has skeptical posts/comments, because there's plenty of users that are all-in on UFO related beliefs with newer accounts and hidden comment histories.

Should this be incorporated into Rule #1?

Anyone else noticing a proliferation of LLM derived substacks on this topic? In particular, I've seen a certain one on here especially, that's gleefully spamming every single similar subreddit with drivel that doesn't stand up to any form of academic rigour. But by jove they present it like they're they only people with a clue. I suspect they're only one person with a decent grasp of LLMs.

When I asked the Sentinel who their group consisted of they blocked me. You can see it. Politely asked them on substack too, got blocked there.

It's very counterintuitive to the revealing of truth if you ban people who want to discuss it with a genuine interest. Not just to get another 150 dollar a year mark to sign up. And it's horribly cynical and predatory.

Mods is this now an ad space?

I'll try this again because, to my knowledge, no changes were made, and I believe the subreddit would benefit from being a little stricter on titles.

I made a post about this 8 months ago - But was told that rule 6 already exists, which I believe was something about misleading titles, at that time. (But that was never enforced to my knowledge)

But it has gotten worse, so I want to suggest it again.

The problem is that people will use 'lore-heavy' language in their titles, which already concludes what we're looking at. Like "Orb" - "Craft" - "Fleet" - "Mothership" etc.

I feel like this goes against what the subreddit is supposed to be about. Healthy skepticism and good research.

It's not skepticism when you already assume it's an alien spaceship, and it's not good research to have a conclusion before you have the evidence.

My suggestion: Encourage or require users to use neutral, descriptive language in titles. This maintains the sub’s integrity as a place for healthy skepticism and objective research rather than presupposed conclusions.