How is this still so crazy when we have 100s of interviews by military and intelligence personnel talking about this stuff openly: https://www.youtube.com/user/csetiweb/videos?shelf_index=0&v...
What exactly discredits all of them?
What exactly discredits all of them?
I would expect about the same in quantity and quality for a major UFO sighting.
Hell we have whole tribes we've only just discovered. If something doesnt want to be found, its not impossible for it to stay hidden.
The giant squid is rare but not unsubstantiated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBRZuafewzI
A sentient species capable of interstellar travel would almost certainly be able to avoid detection by humanity if they wanted to, I will agree.
Well, we've got documented reports going back continuously to the ancient Greeks of giant squid, and photographic evidence going back almost as far as common photography. So, its not so more that we needed "vehicles capable of exploring where they are found" to substantiate them as we needed photography, etc., for people other than those who directly encountered them to be able to clearly distinguish the real reports of giant squid from all the rumors of fantastic beasts that lack such evidence.
If there are aliens, even if they can easily elude us, it seems likely that there would still be traces of them had they visited. Some sort of technological foot prints, whether they be emissions from ships or communications, or actual pieces of technology that have been left behind or broken off. Something, somewhere, you'd think.
And for the record, we have more video and imagery of these unexplained phenomenon then we do of the giant squid. They, for whatever reason, just dont leave bodies floating up on the beaches.
The only thing that is actually doubted is nonsense like the existence of squid the size of ships, big enough to take on Naval vessels. Much like the round nature of the Earth was never in question, just the idea that it was small enough to make sailing right around it a sensible thing to do.
From a scientific standpoint Im not sure what you'd need for something like this. After all up until recently the long standing testimony by pilots about sprites, elfs, ball lightning (atmospheric electrical phenomenon) and the like had no credible evidence except eye witness.
Further there is a ton, literally 1000s of hours of video and 1000s of images. Most are fake but many (including in the op report) remain unexplained. Its exceedingly unscientific in the face of unexplained evidence to simply say - 'nah nothing is happening there, lets just ignore it and the corroborating evidence and not investigate any further'.
Im not saying I know the answer, Im saying ignoring all the exceedingly large masses of information is ignorant. Exceedingly so when we literally have the evidence you're claiming doesn't exist (video and pictures gallore).
By the way. Pilots were crazy high back in the day, weren't they? Amphetamines and that kind of thing? Just saying.
Also, you complain about people not investigating these events. That's obviously not true. It's just that (so it seems, anyway) if nothing ever comes out of it, people stop investigating.
You mean eye witness testimony backed up with actual forensic evidence like a dead body or a missing person, right? It's not eye witness testimony disconnected from physical reality, because there are tons of crank pots that wouldn't stand up under cross-examination.
The best thing UFO advocates could do would be to pre-emptively debunk stuff, classify and label the fake stuff as fake or explainable by simpler causes, abandons old inconclusory evidence, and promote the small proportion of genuinely inexplicable phenomena that remain. I used to be very interested in UFO stuff but have completely given up looking at websites and so on because ther is too much shit to wade through. Lowish evidentiary standards were somewhat tolerable when the resources required to organize and study it were so much greater - there was a limit to what any one author could do. But with the internet, forums, worldwide mapping software, open-source image-processing tools and what-all else, UFO classification should be many many times better than it is, just as most scientific endeavors have benefited from digital technology. Instad there are forums like Godlikeproductions and prisonplanet that are mostly populated by gullible and/or mentally ill people.
If you want this issue taken seriously, then treat it seriously - use standards of evidence, consider things in their social context (eg many UFO reports were classified because of cold war paranoia and the desire to maintain a strategic military advantage), winnow out the wheat from the chaff, and invite people to falsify rather than endorse difficult cases. As you pointed out elsewhere, many people have trouble processing complex scientific information like climate change and so are reflexively skeptical about it. Well, that's the environment you're stuck with too, and UFO research has a long way to go before it can even start to be taken seriously as a topic of scientific inquiry by the general public.
Even looking at relatively well-curated sites like http://www.ufoevidence.org/ the front page still has 'Featured!' cases from 1959, 1974 that are nothing but reports of a single eyewitness. Mysterious? Sure, but of zero evidentiary value a half-century later, and therefore a waste of time. UFO advocates' collective inability to let go of such nostalgia cases tells us more about their psychology than about any physical phenomenon.
For the most part the "latest" UFO shots you can find out there are grainy film cameras shots from the early 90's just about when the X-Files was fresh and cool. As we get closer to the 2000's for some reason all of those photos dry out, i guess ET's are just camera shy.
My guess is YOU stopped paying attention b/c xfiles was no longer cool...
I suspect that his passion on the issue was inspired by an experience. I have known a couple of people who saw things that defy explanation and you pretty much can't make them shut up about it.
I'm not screaming ERRMUHGERD ALIENS! I'm just saying that many people see things that defy the mundane explanations of passenger aircraft, birds, swamp gas and the planet Venus. It's perfectly normal for someone who has had such an experience to be interested in the subject matter.
To quote Donald Rumsfeld, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
I consider myself to be an open-minded skeptic.
I'm in the "Hey Stan, did you find that proof yet? No. OK. I'll be over here, let me know if you find it" camp.
And by all accounts considering that the amount of people with cameras increased by at least a ten fold since the 90's we should've the same an increase in UFO sightings as well, which well unless you count the text to speech youtube flicks about planet X and the anunaki didn't really happen.
However, the sheer variability of these reports does discredit the idea that there is a common explanation for all of these sightings. And that's where things like the alien visitation hypothesis begin to unravel. For the most part UFOlogists fail to see the forest for the trees - they look at each story individually, and never really spend any time trying to figure out how they could all possibly fit together into a single coherent story. Occam's razor also compels us to seek different explanations for different phenomena in the absence of any compelling evidence to show that they are, in fact, related.
The problem is, it's nearly impossible to come up with explanations for every single isolated anecdote by virtue of that very isolation. Skeptics understand this truism so implicitly that they oftentimes even fail to realize it's worth mentioning.
Also presidents of the USA. Reagan and Carter both have UFO stories they have talked about openly.