not a fan of this one. sure, it's competently written, but apart from the actual entity itself there's barely anything anomalous about this. i'm pretty sure that if i encountered a massive strobing flying saucer i'd start believing in aliens, and as a result i'd pretty soon start wondering if there's actually some truth to the area 51 conspiracy. in regards to the part about implanted false memories, i think a person confronted with such a fantastical encounter would start becoming less logical and question past experiences of theirs. also how does the authority know that these 2 million or so people are all like this because of the entity's effects?
in addition, the flying saucer entity (the central anomaly!) barely appears in the article. after the description, it takes a backseat for the site-002 shenanigans. i wish we got more of it; show the interactions people have with it, maybe give it a personality, just show it in action! i'm also wondering how affected people discuss having this exact same experience of the same tentacled spaceship flashing lights at them.
the incident logs, which i'm assuming were supposed to be comedic, i didn't find funny. with the unnatural incompetence shown by the authority (especially with that cover story bit. i mean come on), and the "well that just happened" notes from the site director, it all felt very lolauthority. the redaction part especially, and sorry about my bluntness here, felt like i was looking at a post from r/dankmemesfromsite19.
there's no interesting examination of how these conspiracies start and spread, this article just throws a thing-that-makes-you-go-crazy anomaly to the audience and says "conspiracy theorists so wacky, amirite". the podcast transcript also didn't really bring anything new to the article that hadn't been made clear before.
apologies, but this gets a +1 from me.
