Your thanks will be being erased from the narrative.
I’ve thought about this before.
A big part of it is that as humans, the world is a scary and confusing place. As a result we build beliefs about the world that we become emotionally dependent on. We become emotionally dependent on these beliefs because they make the world feel safer, more predictable, and easier to control than the real world actually is. Humans desperately crave a sense of stability, predictability and safety in life. Plus our identities become intertwined with our beliefs. Also novel beliefs can make us feel like outcasts, and nobody wants to be an outcast.
If those beliefs get overturned, then people’s sense of safety is under threat and there are massive defense mechanisms that get activated to help invalidate the new beliefs/evidence and to maintain the old beliefs.
Its kind of like what Max Planck said that ‘science progresses one funeral at a time’. Part of it is that you just have to let people who are emotionally invested in the old paradigm die off and be replaced by younger people whose minds were formed with the new belief incorporated into it, so they do not have the belief perseverance defense mechanisms to deal with.
Point being, I don’t know if you can change people’s minds. The best you can do is provide the most detailed evidence possible. Make sure the evidence is airtight, because if you provide 100 studies and of those 100 studies, 1 study has a flaw, people will latch onto that 1 flaw to say ‘everything you say is a lie’ because that lets them avoid losing their attachment to their existing belief structures.
Right now, in our current world, there are a lot of folks pushing false narratives. Inside job 911, flat earth, no moon landing, holocaust deniers - that some people belive.
But even more down to earth - like the OP - Bigfoot, aliens, etc
How do they do it? Maybe grab the ear of the world leaders (or install your own). [I do not mean to drag politics into this, but as an example] Our leader convinced half of the population that COVID wasn’t dangerous while hundreds of thousands were dying all around them.
I’m thinking appealing to conspiratorial minds is the quickest way to push a counter-intuitive idea.
Donald? Is that you?