None of those planes look like UFOs and they wouldn't move in the same reported ways, either. I don't agree that it makes someone stupid to be open minded.
Yet today's pop culture conspiracy theorists tried to raid Area 51 for their beliefs.
Don't get me wrong: I believe in alien life. But I don't believe in conspiracy theorists that are blind to the obvious in correlations of evidence.
Scientific theory is about bayesian reasoning, not about proving to yourself that you're right; which is a likely phenomenon in the thinking nature of conspiracy theorists.
The Area51 raid was an imgur joke...I think Chuck Norris and Shaggy were supposed to lead it. (The 2 most powerful memes on the internet...)
For that comment to be true, there would be no science without bayesian reasoning. Since bayesian reasoning differs from hypothetico-deductive, that is false.
This thing is _huge_ and honestly, it's very reasonable people thought it was an alien spaceship.
It's not stupid to be open minded, but it is stupid to ignore plausible explanations of phenomenon because you are hoping to find something new.
This sentence reads like you are casually dismissing all of science..
Surely "The Earth is flat", "Rain spirits make the rain fall from the sky" and "We are at the center of the universe, being created by God and all" were plausible explanations of phenomena that were eventually ignored by scientists hoping to find something new.
That sentence is the very essence of science. Most observations are easily explained by existing theory. If you are proposing something new, you need evidence and time to upend the consensus.
Flat Earth, rain spirits etc all were disproven because, eventually, the most plausible explanation of phenomena matched evidence to the contrary rather than what existed.
Scientists don't ignore flat earth, they weight it's evidence just the same as a globe earth. The reason that the globe earth is accepted as the consensus truth, is that it has the overwhelming evidence of its veracity, an argument for the globe collected over a long period of time.
Agreed. But when you filter all those, you are left with a huge pile of true UFO reports, that come from trained personnel, radar operator, astronomers, etc. Look at the conclusions of Blue Book.
But what is that? A report of an object, that is unidentified. The only truth is that an observation was made.
There are many many mundane things, albeit rare, which can explain these observations. Rare mundane things that even trained observers aren't aware of in the moment.
Point is, UFO report is step one. After that comes a boring process of trying to explain the observation with all in all the mundane ways before jumping to extreme conclusions.
>But what is that?
A "true UFO", as stated in my previous comment, is a report that survives...
> Point is, UFO report is step one. After that comes a boring process of trying to explain the observation with all in all the mundane ways before jumping to extreme conclusions.
...all this process, and remains unexplained. That boring process of trying to explain it is what I called "filtering".
I kind of wish Unidentified Flying Object hadn't been conflated with space aliens.