I’ll look through the rest of that stuff late, and am interested in it, but re: “I thought you’d laugh that one out of the room,” I don’t believe alien/UFO encounter stories at face value, but I think alot of the people who have those experiences aren’t lying and aren’t all experiencing some very dramatic hallucination. My understanding is that explanations for people’s UFO encounters that are reasonably similar to that Yuba 5 theory are pretty mainstream & respectable. But something as elaborate as what we see in that Reddit post makes more sense when we have a story from a survivor that we’re trying to make sense of. That type of explaction is usually built out of details from an existing story, when it’s believe that someone is telling a story about fantastic events that they believe happened to them. That Reddit theory wasn’t based on the kinds of details that you already have in something like the Betty and Barney Hill abduction. In that sense, I think it’s wildly over-speculative. But I think that it’s something that could happen, and that type of explanation seem more likely than them turning up the mountain accidentally and then not bothering to push the car out of the snow when it couldn’t have been stuck that badly.

Btw, if you don’t know about the Hill abduction story, they had a UFO encounter, then went to a psychologist and were hypnotized, and “remembered” a different story under hypnosis. I think the stuff they said under hypnosis was just manufacture by the hypnotism session, because that’s how “recovered memories” actually work. That’s all the explanation that part of the story needs. I was comparing the Yuba 5/UFO theory to the story the told before they were hypnotized.