My dad did accident investigation for the Air Force for a time. One time there was a crash into the sea, amply witnessed by many on board a Navy ship, including pilots. They all said the wings came off the airplane before it hit the water. (The airplane had a reputation for wings coming off.) These people honestly believed that's what they saw.
Except for one Navy seaman, on his first trip on a boat. He said the wings were on when it hit the water.
So they pulled the airplane up from the bottom, and lo, the wings were on when it hit. One the seaman saw the truth, because he was not predisposed to attribute the crash to a known fault in the airplane.
This is really key. Eyewitness accounts are reliably dismal in evidentiary value, even by people with relevant knowledge. Our brains lie to us all the time.
I remember a case long ago where a woman was cruelly raped. She was face-to-face with her attacker. She identified him in a lineup, he was convicted, and sent to prison.
He always insisted on his innocence, but people just laughed at him. She was face to face with him, and identified him. But decades later, as DNA testing became available, a testing was done and he was not a match! But a known sex offender was a match, and had died in prison some years earlier. They dug up a picture of him, and he looked just like the wrongfully accused man.
The woman apologized to him as best she could, but her mistake was an honest one, and the falsely convicted man did not blame her. The jury did the right thing based on the evidence. It was just a horrible coincidence.
Eyewitness testimony is the gold standard in court. But I'm skeptical of it. I'd like to see hard evidence if I was on a jury. Fortunately, hard evidence is a lot more easily obtained than it used to be.
This is a case of a single witness during a single traumatizing event.
You're trying to compare this to a situation where we have thousands of witnesses across time across hundreds of events, with a few events having multiple witnesses.
This is one example using a minor observational discrepancy. Put it this way- All the observers agreed with the reality that the plane did hit the water.
You're basically using this 1 example to prove that 10, 100, 1000 people all saying that the plane hit the water (with or without wings) is not evidence of anything hitting the water (assuming no aircraft was found).
The question in THIS case is not whether "the wings fell off before or after hitting the water, if at all", but whether "there was a plane hitting the water at all" or "whether there even was a plane" (also a plane that was caught on multiple radars).
It's simply not a good comparison. The Navy pilots say they see bogies on radar (not just visually) every day. Watch the "60 Minutes" broadcast I linked elsewhere (which is only 13 minutes long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY). The USG has already admitted these things are real but have an unknown source. To continue to maintain extreme skepticism at this point is to bury one's head in the sand.
If the radar system exhibited other types of "steady anomalies identifying nonexistent objects in space" that didn't happen to fit the "UFO expectation", we would be hearing of those too, no? Have we? Since the whole point of a radar system is identifying friend, foe or possible collision courses, it would seem to be extremely important that this basic function of a radar be extremely reliable, no?
Also, what are the chances that both the radar AND the person's eyesight (which saw the object in the first place) are failing in the exact same way and with the exact same concordance? That has to be absolutely astronomical.
So, no. You didn't compute your probabilities correctly in this case. Try again.
It's like when people trivially dismiss eyewitness observers for "seeing things" every single time. I just Googled, and US citizens drive 3.2 trillion miles each year on US roads, which most of the time have two-way traffic with NO divider in between. If observers were as inaccurate as dismissals suggest, we should also be seeing FAR more accidents, head-on collisions etc. The error rate of the human visual system (if not the memory system which is admittedly often faultier) has to be extremely low to see the RELATIVELY low number of accidents we see. It's fundamental to survival for the human visual system to be as precise and accurate as possible.
I've been hearing my whole life about the "it can only be aliens" explanation. Many, many of these have been debunked, but it never dampens the enthusiasm "yeah, but this one must be aliens!"
Why has nobody ever taken a photo of these alleged aliens?
It's up to the proponents to provide convincing evidence. "But I saw it with my own eyes!" is completely unconvincing. Anyone who claims to have never misinterpreted anything they saw is just not credible. Optical illusions affect everyone.
Sane drivers know this and take it into account when driving, that's why it doesn't cause (many) accidents, and is so ordinary nobody bothers to report it.
The human visual system is full of compromises and kludges that just happen to work well enough. Did you know that your eyes have a blind spot that your brain fills in for you? By guessing? That magicians rely on all kinds of errors your brain makes in perception?
I hear you on the "it must be aliens!" argument. Really, I do. And until at least the concept of the "Alcubierre drive" came out, one could simply claim "there's no possible way for any being to physically come here from any galactic-level distance because of the amount of time it would take at sub-light speeds" and that would be the end of the story. (Even then, my response was usually "no way that we can think of"...)
I am well aware of all of your other arguments, as I was a Psych major who specialized in perception.
I'm of the government's stance on this currently: I think it's a real phenomenon, I trust most qualified eyewitnesses especially if it is in concordance with radar data, and I refuse to concretely claim anything further. And it is a mystery.
But I AM free to speculate.
I could claim something like "assuming there IS some alien intelligence controlling these hyper-performing craft... if another intelligence was advanced enough to even make it here in the first place, ostensibly they also have fairly full control over all elements of the interactions with us, which includes not showing themselves outside their craft", but this is also the Conspiracy Fallacy. Two thoughts on that though: The Conspiracy Fallacy does not disprove conspiracies (which is why I am openly stating this is speculative). And secondly, this also means that (if this claim is at all true), they are likely voluntarily showing themselves at some "pace" as to not overly upset us. Why that? Well, perhaps you've heard of systematic desensitization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization) as a treatment for phobias? That might be going on here. And it's apparently working, since nothing crazy's happened since the USG openly admitted this is real. This is a far cry from the Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast days.
So, no. I can't say it's aliens, at least rationally. But I do speculate that. ;) And honestly, I think it's fun to think that not only might we be not alone (wouldn't that be amazing??) but that we're kind of in a galactic kindergarten. ;)
The number is infinity. There is a reason that data is not the plural of anecdote.
Once scrutinized, these phenomena are almost always explained by humans misinterpreting their instruments (either machine readout, or their own eyes).
Honestly, you wouldn't believe how many people report _the moon_ as a UFO because it shows up in an odd place, gets distorted by unique atmospheric conditions, and can appear in different shapes and sizes (moon phase and proximity to Earth).
These people aren't idiots. Their brains evolved to recognize patterns as a survival mechanism. Arguably their pattern recognition is stronger than everybody else's. But when you factor in lack of familiarity with the scientific method, or inclination towards spirituality, or a simple willingness to believe in extraterrestrial life, it's not uncommon to hear stories about ghosts, angels, and aliens.
These stories do not stand up to inquiry. They have been tested time and time again and always fall apart under scrutiny. The reason that Bigfoot photos are always blurry isn't because he's camera shy - it's because when the photos are not blurry, we can clearly see it's not Bigfoot.
NB: I have no problem with believing in alien life in terms of say the Drake equation (statistically, it's probable!). I just find it highly unlikely of such a visitor reaching Earth.
> Honestly, you wouldn't believe how many people report _the moon_ as a UFO because it shows up in an odd place, gets distorted by unique atmospheric conditions, and can appear in different shapes and sizes (moon phase and proximity to Earth).
A disturbing number of people think that the Moon only comes out at night, opposite of the Sun. Probably because cartoons and video games depict it that way, but it's still a real head scratcher how some people never notice the moon in the sky during the day, which it is for roughly half of each and every month.
Also the other essential problem: you never stop being afraid of the dark.
This is evolutionarily sensible: we're a tribal species with a group-collective survival strategy, but few natural defenses: no fur, poor night vision. We're almost entirely dependent on tool-using to exist in the wild, it's our edge but it makes us very vulnerable.
UFO reports disproportionately occur at night, and also from relatively isolated people. It doesn't matter how smart you are, it's almost impossible to turn off those primitive senses which tell you "you're in danger, you need to be aware". Being afraid of something which is not there and avoiding it is a vastly preferable strategy if it also means you're afraid of something which is there.
But if I were an alien trying to monitor earth from space ships, and I had some sort of radar stealth technology, I'd also fly at night to avoid visual detection.
If you were an alien with the technology to cross the vast distances between the stars why in the hell would you need to monitor Earth from within the atmosphere flying your spaceship around? Earth technology exists to read a license plate from orbit. You can somehow build the technology for interstellar travel but can't manage to build telescopes?
For the quarter the cost of Twitter you could build a pretty sweet Earth monitoring station on the surface of the Moon. It makes zero sense that aliens with essentially magic space travel technology couldn't do the same and go completely undetected by people on Earth.
You're assuming that interstellar travel is so difficult that if it can be done, anything else can be done too. It's a fallacy a bit like someone from the 1500s assuming that any civilization that can put a man on the moon must have also cured all disease.
If you can build a spaceship that can effectively travel to another star system you have the exact technology needed to build a fucking telescope when you get there. The very ship you use for the trip likely has a very capable telescope as it would be needed to avoid interstellar debris en route.
The scale and scope of "building a telescope" and "building an interstellar spacecraft" are not just comparable but directly related. I'd also assume such a civilization would have a good handle on diseases, at least have a strong understanding of them.
It turns out that the civilization on Earth that landed on the Moon also had a pretty decent understanding of disease. By the time of the Moon landing many diseases that wracked the world in the 1500s were well under control in the first world. Some were even eliminated.
Telescopes are great but aren't going to tell you much about the exact radar capabilities of a nuclear aircraft carrier, nor what tactics it would use if it did see a craft, nor submarines (one of the incident reports claimed the tictac went underwater). And monitoring Earth is a very general thing, it can even include getting up close with the native wildlife, it isn't restricted as a concept to viewing from a great distance.
Venus is even "worse" than the moon for blowing people's minds. It's less frequent, and gets very bright - the 3rd brightest natural object in the sky- able to cast faint shadows, and even visible in daylight. Reportedly, the US Navy once tried to shoot it down:
https://m.facebook.com/NavalInstitute/posts/1015948215350217...
Depends on whether physical evidence is obtainable.
I.e. If you come out of a room and tell me you saw something in there, ok, let's consider it.
If you come out of a room and say you saw something there, but the security camera placed there doesn't show it, you have no photos on the iPhone you had at the ready, nobody else saw it, etc... Yeah the number of such reports needed climbs quite high.
There are mountains of evidence and billions of "eyewitness" accounts of Santa, including "NORAD is tracking him". The iconography, imagery, and tales are ubiquitous to the point of it being nearly an independent religion. Yet exactly 100.000...000% of those observations, photos, images are insubstantial.
I want to believe as much as anyone that there are technically advanced aliens nearby who are could and would help us advance.
But all I've seen so far is a lot of interesting and a bit overly credulous accounts, and some fuzzy evidence. And much of it can be accounted for by observer or instrument error. Maybe the classified material has something clear and unequivocal; that'd be nice.
Until we have something clear and revealing, lets investigate by all means. But until then, let's not jump to conclusions either way.
Without being taught or gathering evidence, the first conclusion that every human would come to on their own is that they live on a flat plane. Yet this is patently untrue. The human perspective is often fundamentally flawed, and only after conducting actual science can you arrive at something even slightly representing the truth.
How many eyewitness accounts of mermaids devoid of physical evidence have there been?
I don’t think there’s any amount of eyewitness accounts of aliens that I would consider credible evidence without having something verifiable to corrobate them.
OK so assuming all the witnesses' accounts are in reasonable concordance (the broad strokes are fairly identical in account), what is that number?
I had a funny showerthought the other day- Imagine that orgasms never existed, but a human had one one day and had to explain to others what it was and that it was real and how it felt. This person would be ENTIRELY not believed. Now let's assume this 1 person became 10, 100, 1000. At what point do you reasonably have to start to wonder if orgasms are, in fact, real?
If this number is "infinity" for you, that is unreasonable.