Every time one of those fantastic items gets explained, it's always mundane and boring, and never dampens the enthusiasm for the next one.
I recall one about B+W photographs of "wood elves" taken around 1910 or so by a couple girls. The girls insisted it was genuine. Photographic experts declared the photos were genuine and could not have been faked.
When the girls were in their 80's, they finally confessed that the "wood elves" were drawn on paper, cut out, and propped up with sticks. They took photos of it with a brownie camera. They laughed with glee at the credulous people who took it seriously (because they so wanted to believe in wood elves).
Quite a bizarre strawman [1] that doesn't prove your point at all. Here we have multiple professional pilots reporting similar events, with recorded evidence from the tracking systems on their fighter planes. And enough evidence that even Congress has authorised to look into it further. It probably is all some natural thing happening, but it's not some hoax by teenager girls in the 1920s.
>Here we have multiple professional pilots reporting similar events, with recorded evidence from the tracking systems on their fighter planes.
to be clear : multiple professionals from the same government, similar cultures and professional background, using similar equipment, tactics, sensor arrays, and vehicles, in a similar geographical region.
Maybe i'm jaded, but 'multiple professionals' means absolutely nothing to me if every one of those professionals is a cog in the same propaganda mill.
I'll be more likely to buy into any of these stories once we have agreeing reports from groups of people that aren't coordinated to play-nice with one another.
That objection only works because the people on the ship had an expectation of what the fault could be. Presumably fighter pilots have expectations of what other aircraft, balloons and birds could be, and these phenomena defy those characteristics. These just don't seem comparable.
The first 4 photographs look quite obviously like paper cutouts to me, not sure why the examiners believed they must be real.
Also interesting, both of the sisters claimed that they were the one who took the final photograph with Elsie saying it was a fake and Frances claiming that that one was real. Perhaps a false memory?
* Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes was one of the boosters of the photograph. This sounds weird but there's about an Arthur Conan Doyle book that relates to reality in messy detail. There's generally no deducible explanation of random events, they're just random. And so the method of "excluding all other explanation" is generally worthless in trying to look at single events - actually "shit happens".
* I would claim that virtually anyone looking at the elf/fairy pictures today will see ... cardboard cutouts. Their two dimensionality is obvious when I look at them. But they fooled the people of their day because photography was quite new and people's visual processing had not adjusted to it.
> I would claim that virtually anyone looking at the elf/fairy pictures today will see ... cardboard cutouts.
And this is such an important point. The UFO evidence is always the latest thing that can't be easily explained. But our skill at explaining keeps growing. There will always be things we can't explain yet. And some people insist on filling those gaps with aliens, gods, and monsters.
One tell for me here is that the paranormal/supernatural/space alien incidents don't get more confirmed over time. E.g., if there were an artifact like the Antikythera mechanism [1] that continued to become more exotic as science advanced, that'd be interesting to me.
Read Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World with this fairy incident in mind and the character of Professor Challenger will make a lot of sense. tl;dr: man mocked by the scientific majority gets completely vindicated.
I recall one about B+W photographs of "wood elves" taken around 1910 or so by a couple girls. The girls insisted it was genuine. Photographic experts declared the photos were genuine and could not have been faked.
When the girls were in their 80's, they finally confessed that the "wood elves" were drawn on paper, cut out, and propped up with sticks. They took photos of it with a brownie camera. They laughed with glee at the credulous people who took it seriously (because they so wanted to believe in wood elves).