• sure, I'll still go to work at my strip club job!
• sure, I'll casually joke around with my army buddy about totally unrelated matters!
• sure, instead of running news about the *beep* ALIENS ATTACKING EARTH, I'll run a piece about a local crazy guy getting arrested!
Jesus, what terrible writing.
These days I don't think these reactions are far fetched. Some observations:
i. Catastrophic climate change is here. Roads are literally melting due to extreme heat. Records are falling everywhere. Everyone is carrying on like the extinction of our modern civilization isn't going to happen.
ii. Last year there was a significant report on UAPs (re-branded from UFOs). Military videos and testimony confirmed that these things are out there, have a physical presence, and they don't know what they are. Probably some super advanced secret government tech on display -- domestic or foreign who knows? -- but nobody has intelligence on them.
Even when obliquely asked whether they could be extraterrestrial, they simply shrugged and concluded: "Don't know but they bear watching."
I would have thought the reaction would have been far stronger than that. Craft that can easily outrun and out maneuvre ours -- with no apparent aerodynamic surfaces -- would be a cause for major concern.
Collectively, the public response was just a shrug. (I'm an engineer with science degrees so maybe I have a bigger interest in this subject than the average lay person.)
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_M0hLlJ-Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPrYVmYkL5w