Up in the Sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a…

Sweet Bites for April 18, 2025

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the theme of Story.

Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.

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🍰 Mini Bite

Up in the sky whizzes something and then is gone.

Sleek.

Silver.

Traveling at never before seen speeds.

Someone who caught sight of this from the desert of Nevada would think it was something out of this world.

And some did just that.

For decades, every day people claimed to have seen the UFOs flying over the Nevada desert. Thousands of reports of people claiming to have witnessed them with their own eyes.

The tales grew, and Area 51 became a legend.

Area 51 was where the government was hiding aliens. The base was locked down tighter than Fort Knox. No one was ever allowed in. The conspiracies continued to grow with sightings of little green men, more out of this world spaceships. Even abductions.

But then in 2013, something happened:

The CIA released classified documents on Area 51 based upon a Freedom of Information Act request.

Area 51, it turns out, is a highly classified military base that was used during the Cold War for the making and testing of U.S. stealth planes.

The military built a runway in the dried up lake and flew the planes over the desert. There were two planes people had been mistaking as UFOs: the first, from the 1950s, was the U-2 spy plane and soon after that, the Lockheed A-12, the precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird.

These planes were marvels for their time, flying up to 2,000 miles per hour and as high as 90,000 feet, these planes ripped through the air at speeds and heights no one had ever seen before. The outer casings were also made of titanium, and when the sun reflected off them, it looked like a flying saucer.

As Michael Shermer documents from an Area 51 veteran:

"The shape… was unprecedented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom… whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's titanium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO."

Do aliens exist? Maybe. Likely, if you think of how many galaxies exist in the known universe.

But that’s not the question we should be asking ourselves, rather, we should be asking why we’re so inclined to believe things so easily.

When we don’t know something, we think in broad ideas. We think not by depth but by breadth. That is to say, we connect dots at large scales to form a connective or linear storyline rather than drill down and look at the validity of our thoughts.

Just because a thought arises within us doesn’t make it true. This is an important concept to understand so it’s worth pausing, reflecting, and repeating:

Just because a thought arises within our mind doesn’t make it true.

And while we do not control these thoughts as they arise, we take accountability for them. Our thoughts drive our beliefs and our beliefs drive our actions.

We therefore must come to treat our thoughts with a bit of skepticism, especially when we are encountering an event for the first time.

“Our brains are belief engines, evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature,” writes Shermer. “Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not.”

To have seen a real-life alien spacecraft is a neat story to tell. But a story almost as cool is knowing your own government built a stealth plane so amazing you mistook it for technology out of this world.

Sometimes the truth can be just as amazing as the fictionalized story we tell. We just have to be willing to go deeper to find the truth.

🧘🏻This Week’s Monday Meditation

🦉 This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom

✏️ This Week’s Most Popular Substack Note

📰 Article Worthy of a Read

I am not a story: Some find it comforting to think of life as a story. Others find that absurd. So are you a Narrative or a non-Narrative?

by Galen Strawso

Really interesting article on self-narration and how some of us do and do not mentally narrate their lives.

📖 Book Recommendation

The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer

If you want to dive into the science behind where our beliefs come from, why our brains are wired for belief, and how we can gain better control over our pattern-seeking minds, then this book is for you.

Shermer dives deep into different common beliefs from UFOs to conspiracies and many more, looking at what makes us believe in such things.

A few passages I think about:

“We are natural-born supernaturalists, driven by our tendency to find meaningful patterns and impart to them intentional agency.”

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“Physically touching someone is a mind extension, and if they touch you back it creates a feedback loop. Language was the first evolved form of extended mind, and the written word extended language even further, as did the printing press, printed books, and newspapers. Most recently, radio, television, and especially the Internet have supersized the brain and extended the mind throughout the globe and even into space.”

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“Beliefs come first; reasons for belief follow in confirmation of the realism dependent on the belief.”

📚 Wisdom

“In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal.”

Joseph Campbell

Source: Pathways to Bliss

🎥 Worth Watching

In the below video, Robert Greene walks through how to better know oneself to gain mastery over one’s life.

Think someone you know would enjoy these? Hit below to forward and spread the love.

Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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