James Fox -- July 1, 2012

[Apocalypto]

Ok... then what?

Lance

Something unidentified, thus the term "UFO".

 

[SPX]

Ok... then what?

Yeah, that's why anecdotal evidence doesn't move the bar very far.

Lance

Well if we had a crystal clear video, what then? All it would do is prove their existence. But without the ability to communicate with ET or learn anything about them, it wouldn't be of much more value than witness testimony.

The fact of the matter is that we all rely upon the testimony of others all the time. There are many historical figures that we presume to have existed and to have done things because of what was written about them or supposedly written by them. Few, if any, people, for instance, doubt the existence of Christopher Columbus. But just about all the evidence that we have exists in the forms of documentation, i.e. people saying that such-and-such happened.

Even today the same thing exists. Pick up any newspaper and it is full of accounts of things that supposedly happened, things that, often times, the writer didn't even witness him or herself, but rather is merely recounting the tales of others. And yet, we believe our newspaper accounts to be generally trustworthy.

I am reminded of a quote from the book "Lies My Teacher Told Me": History is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues and controversies.

And a large part of what we believe about history is based on anecdotal evidence. People such as yourself no doubt believe many things for no other reason than that someone told it to you or because you read it somewhere. But for some reason when it comes to something like UFOs, anecdotal evidence is suddenly untrustworthy and without value.

 

[SPX]

You make so many wrong assumptions that it's hard to respond.

Oh, well don't overburden yourself or anything.

History is not purely anecdotal...it is a derived narrative drawn from VARIOUS forms of data which, at its highest level, weighs the most contemporaneous and objective data greater than the other stuff.

I never said it was. That's why I used the example of Columbus, because at least in his case most of what we know about him--or think we know about him--is based upon documentation like his own journals, his son's journals, letters from himself to the King and Queen of Spain, etc.

I am aware that our understanding of history is not based solely upon anecdotal evidence . . . but that doesn't change the fact that a great deal of it is, and we all accept it as (most likely) true.

By the way, much of the stuff you are calling history (the stuff derided in pop culture books about historical "mistakes") was never accepted by historians but was just believed by dumb ass laypeople like you and be without the facts in hand.

Well at least in regard to the book that I quoted from, that's exactly the point of the book: Common "knowledge" about history is greatly polluted by our high school textbooks, which are in fact full of errors.

Of course, those textbooks were written by individual historians, so. . .

I don't assume that witness testimony about UFOS indicates a prosaic source solely because it is anecdotal. I do so because the evidence leads that way. The fact is that the more data is available for a specific sighting, the more likely a prosaic cause is located.

Well contrary to the conclusions you seem to have already reached about me, I don't necessarily believe that ET is visiting us. But I am open to the possibility and I do believe that anecdotal evidence is powerful, especially in great quantities.

At the very least, I do think that some people have seen things that a) really existed, and b) are not readily explainable with our current understanding of physics and military technology.

For me at least. I realize that some folks do value the shovelfuls of lights in the sky reports as meaning something greater. Have at it, I say. Just don't pretend that you're being scientific (not directing this at anyone in particular SPX just believers in general).

Well I have never placed much faith at all in lights-in-the-sky reports simply because they could be anything, but reports of massive, obviously physical, nuts-and-bolts craft should be taken seriously, in my opinion. Especially when there are multiple independent witnesses who who provide similar reports.

 

[SPX]

Fair enough. I appreciate your apology and follow-up. Typing mistakes are easy to make.

I will also modify my message.

 

[boomerang]

I'm not quite sure that I know what you saying above. Could you clarify it for me?

Lance

Just that after factoring out noise, artifact and hoax, there is a kernel of mystery worthy of contemplation and serious discussion. It may or may not prove amenable to rational analysis, and we needn't reach an explanation worthy of engendering belief in anything in order to label it persistently anomalous.

Perhaps a need for explanation to the "credible witness paradox" is a personal value judgment. I personally find it perplexing.

 

[RenaissanceLady]

I assume you're talking about the Belgian triangle photo. If so, at least as of the last I heard, the extent of proving the photo was fake was some dude saying he was the one who faked it. I'm not sure who the guy is, or what his motivation is for saying that he did it, but unless he can replicate it then I don't think that's very much reason to jump to the conclusion that the photo is indeed a hoax.

But let me ask you: When you heard that someone said they had faked the photo did you immediately say "well that settles that!" or did you do your due diligence and investigate further?

Thank you.

It amazes me that "skeptics" will say that they know that this was all fake because someone said so, yet fail to ask that if it really was fake, why were there scores of witnesses over several months, Belgium Air Force Pilots who actually chased the thing and multiple radar hits? I would think a true skeptic would be asking these questions.

The only "evidence" that anything was fake was one person who claimed he faked one photo. Big whoopee.

Belgian UFO wave - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A critical mind is a valuable tool but not if we only use it to pick apart that which we do not want to hear, regardless of its merits. In the case of the Belgian UFO photo (and the entire Belgian UFO wave), we should weigh those who say they faked evidence against the testimony of scores of other witnesses including military pilots, observers on the ground and numerous radar hits. Even if one photo is a fake, this is no way diminishes what took place over several months. Whether or not these people were observing an alien craft, a military test craft or some kind of other anomaly, something definitely unidentified was in their airspace.

 

[RenaissanceLady]

Boomerang,

Thanks, yes, I would only suggest that there MAY be a mystery left behind not that there is definitely one.

At this point I think it is quite unlikely that this is the case but I know other folks here feel strongly the opposite point of view.

R-Lady,

Hi, I mentioned my thoughts on this elsewhere but in short,the evidence is that the photo WAS faked and I believe that this is now accepted by most parties involved. Leslie Kean sure thought that photo was super important. She called it the holy grail of Ufology. Of course, as soon as it is exposed, it becomes super unimportant, just another photo. No big deal.

It is this quality: that NOTHING can falsify the believer position that usually puts UFOs firmly into the realm of pseudoscience.

The rest of the case is a mess. I wrote some thoughts (on ATS) about the supposed radar data that even as a complete layperson I can see when the story is being falsely manipulated for ooga booga instead of truth.

I can find that link if you care to read it.

Lance

So one fake photo carries more weight than the testimony of two Air Force Pilots who chased the thing and had different radar locks on it? Can a photo do all that? That must have been some photo.

I guess your definition of a skeptic is different than my definition of a skeptic. I think the photo is just a photo, which at most added a bit of dialog about UFO photos. I honestly don't see how it could have triggered a wave of UFO sightings over five months, seen by countless scores of people, tracked on radar and chased by military pilots. Can you please explain to me how a photo can do all of that because I just don't get it.

 

[RenaissanceLady]

So you sidestepped the "holy grail" thing, huh?

I never said that the photo caused the whole story. Don't bother to use straw man BS in order to make your point. You bring yourself down when you do.

The photo is just part of the equation. The press reports, poor witnesses, overzealous believers and the natural lights in the sky all play a part in the overall story. As I mentioned, the radar locks, etc are overstated by believers who have not looked into the case and just accept the credulous stories of other believers.

The VERY wiki article you linked goes into some of the skeptical work done on the case.

We saw the same thing with the Phoenix lights but time compressed.

Best,

Lance

You seem eager to ignore my earlier post in order to build straw man arguments. I guess you want to pick a fight but I'd rather you do so over what I actually said and maybe even read the link I provided, so we could actually have intelligent discourse. If you need to go back and reread my earlier post and that link, I'll wait for you at the next sentence.

That's better. As you can see, from the beginning, I was discussing the other phenomena associated with the Belgian UFO sightings and said the only evidence of any hoax was one person who said he faked one photo. Clearly, I never claimed it was any kind of "Holy Grail" and I'm not aware of it ever being treated as such. The Wiki link doesn't make such a claim and I certainly never said it as I've thought from Day One that the one photo was never a substantial part of the story. The only thing I'm guilty of is you putting your words in my mouth so you could better make the argument you were always going to make.

Most of the weight in the sightings involved the number of people over a number of months who saw the same thing and the credibility of some of those eyewitnesses, including the military pilots. I've been saying this over and over again. I honestly don't know how to say it any more clearly. The only person who cares about the photo is you. I care about the actual story, in its entirety. There's the difference.

 

[SPX]

The only "evidence" that anything was fake was one person who claimed he faked one photo. Big whoopee.

If in fact the photo was faked, I suspect the timeline went something like this:

People See Things --> People Report Seeing Things --> Word Gets Out That People Are Seeing Things --> Someone Decides to Hoax a Photo Based Upon The Reports

Obviously it is the reports that lead to the photo and not the other way around.

 

[RenaissanceLady]

If in fact the photo was faked, I suspect the timeline went something like this:

People See Things --> People Report Seeing Things --> Word Gets Out That People Are Seeing Things --> Someone Decides to Hoax a Photo Based Upon The Reports

Obviously it is the reports that lead to the photo and not the other way around.

That's exactly the case. The photo came out about 4 months after the first wave of sightings. This is why I keep saying that the photo was never a strong part of the story and certainly not the "Holy Grail" some people want to pretend it was, solely for the purpose of discrediting the sightings. It was an afterthought.

 

[SPX]

So you sidestepped the "holy grail" thing, huh?

If the photo is real--in the sense that it actually depicts an alien craft--then it's obviously very important. But no UFO case can rest entirely upon a photo or a video or any other evidence of that kind because in this day and age it is just too easy to fake that kind of stuff.

Photos, videos, etc are always supplemental. Of course we know each others views on anecdotal evidence at this point, but I maintain that until we actually get a hold of an alien craft or ET lands somewhere and actually engages us, the most powerful evidence we have are reports from credible witnesses, especially when there are multiple reports from independent witnesses.

The press reports, poor witnesses, overzealous believers and the natural and manmade lights in the sky all play a part in the overall story.

At least in the case of the Belgian wave, I'm not sure what was "poor" about the witnesses. The best reports we have are from military guys and pilots. That seems to me to be about the best you could hope for.

 

[SPX]

It is this quality: that NOTHING can falsify the believer position that usually puts UFOs firmly into the realm of pseudoscience.

I definitely think that there are a lot of people in this field that fit that description, but I also think that the UFO issue rests upon the entire mass of evidence and not merely one photo or one eye witness report or even one case.

If you could somehow prove that nothing happened at Roswell, that's not a big deal. (A lot of "believers" think that nothing DID happen at Roswell anyway). You prove that nothing happened in Phoenix? Also no big deal. You prove that the Belgian triangle photo is a hoax? The impact of that is very minor.

At the end of the day, even if you did all of the above, you'd still have a LONG way to go before disproving the whole phenomenon.

 

[Muadib]

While I don't agree with Lance that all of these phenomenon are prosaic in nature, he does make a good point. You can't call your outlook scientific if your position is unfalsifiable. That's belief, not science. It's the very opposite of science, in fact, and no different from religion. Just sayin.

 

[SPX]

Sigh.

You underline my point. Your hypothesis is unfalsifiable. This is crank science in a nutshell.

At the end of the day, all I can say is that I'm interested in the truth. If "good science" gets me there, then okay. But I also think that a rigid scientific approach, ironically, can lead away from the truth.

Let's take another issue--a question in which I am an agnostic, like UFOs--the issue of ghosts. You can't catch a ghost . . . can't put it in a test tube . . . can't replicate it's presence. So science won't pay any attention to those who say they've seen or interacted with one.

But does that mean that ghosts don't exist?

For the record, I do believe that a good scientific approach is usually best. But I also feel like due to the rigidity of the discipline, despite its best intentions, science can actually lead you away from reality. Because if you can't catch it, quantify it, study it, replicate it . . . it's not real, right?

There is nothing that can convince you that your underlying premise has problems.

Well like I said, I'm an agnostic on the issue. I really have no idea what is going on in our skies. But I am open to the possibility that it is something fantastic.

I favor the "white crow" argument. As William James said, if you want to prove that there not all crows are black, it's not necessary to prove that none are. You just have to find one white crow.

The "holy grail" comment was from nutty believer, Leslie Kean, by the way not me.

Kean is actually a fantastic journalist.

 

[Muadib]

I'd agree with the statement Lance made, 60+ years of Ufology and what do we really have? Some interesting (at least in my mind) historical correlations, landing trace cases which are open to interpretation and witness testimony, not much more than we had when the whole thing jumped off. Personally, I'm a fence sitter on the whole issue, I'm comfortable saying "I don't know, but I think it's worthy of further study." When I got into the whole thing, I was a definite believer in the ETH. However, the deeper I got into this field the more I found fraud, new age mumbo jumbo and outright bullshit being presented as science fact. Science has it's limitations just like anything else, but I think it's made more progress in our understanding of the world and the universe than any discipline before it and I think it will eventually reveal what's behind the curtain when it comes to UFO's.

 

[SPX]

BTW, there seems to be a love affair with the word "prosaic."

 

[RenaissanceLady]

In the Belgian UFO Wave, the witnesses numbered more than 13,000. While I appreciate that both mass hysteria and mass hallucination are genuine occurrences, I'm unaware of any triggering factor that would have caused such an occurrence in Belgium at this time. Unlike the mass hallucinations that occurred in Holland during WWII, there was no starvation and no constant threat of annihilation due to an occupying enemy. This leaves is with... What...? Bad chocolate as an excuse for so many witnesses? I fully understand that a belief in and desire to see UFOs could certainly have caused many of the sightings. Still, we're kidding ourselves if we believe it would give us more than 13,000 sightings, including by the military pilots who actually chased this thing.

We also need to remember that in addition to eyewitness testimony, there were radar hits both from the ground and in the air by those military pilots. Even if the entire country of Belgium was knee-deep in wacky chocolate (which they refused to share), we're not going to see radar hits due to a mass hallucination. This just doesn't happen.

I have never said that these sightings were caused by alien visitation. Still, something was certainly flying over Belgian skies during those five months. To pretend otherwise in spite of all the evidence and testimony is what requires a leap of faith. If 13,000 people witnessed a murder, there would be a murder investigation even if no physical body was found. In this UFO wave, we have more than eyewitness testimony saying that something was in the air those months. There are those who simply choose to ignore this because it opens up some possibilities they don't care to acknowledge, even if the reality is that a powerful NATO country had no control over its skies for an extended period of time.

 

[trainedobserver]

I wonder what the prosaic explanation is for the person who told me that they saw an object move hundreds of yards in a few seconds to hover soundlessly over his and his girl friend's head on the beach? It was close enough for him to see a large elongated diamond shaped black object with details on its surface.

I talked to both of these people and without going into great detail, have no reason to think they would make something like this up or that they had a common hallucination. The witnesses are convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt they saw something not from here. I talked about this case before in the forum and although I tried I was unable to get them to budge on that even after getting them to admit they are largely ignorant (like most of us) of what the latest experimental aircraft look like.

Given that they could clearly make out a non-standard flying machine of some sort I have to say, they saw an Unidentified Flying Object which is still unidentified to this day. As a manufactured object certainly there is probably a large group somewhere who could identify it because they worked on it. Who manufactured it, what its purpose was, and what it actually was is completely unidentified in my mind and the minds of the witnesses. So "unidentifiable" in their minds as to be completely alien.

Saying these two people did not see an Unidentified Flying Object denies the reality of their experience. In other words you have to say they were lying about it and discard their account or do some mental gymnastics where you say it is only unidentified because we don't have all the data yet, therefore it has potential to be identified rendering the classification of unidentified moot. Yes, it is true that if we had more data it is more likely than not that a prosaic explanation might be found but in this case we don't have the data necessary to provide a prosaic identification and that is why it is in fact correct to call it unidentified. We don't know what it was.

Today's UFO may indeed be tomorrows identified UAV and assuming all UFO accounts are misidentified "known" objects (known by someone) until proven otherwise the soundest tack to take, however denying that people see objects flying in the sky that fit the classification of Unknown Flying Objects doesn't seem reasonable.

I'm holding out for space chicks in bubble helmets and little else arriving in classic domed flying saucers to save the world. Little evidence of this so far ...

 

[SPX]

I might add that the original claim (even after a retraction) always gets parroted by believers as one can see above. Facts can't stand in the way of religious belief.

Yes, well that is a problem, and I doubt that most members on this forum would deny it. There certainly are "true believers"--irrational people who choose to believe first and then go find some evidence . . . any evidence . . . that supports that belief.

Re: radar returns. Like photos and video, I think it's only supplemental. It doesn't prove much in and of itself. But I assume you would agree that it greatly bolsters witness testimony. After all, you have said that you don't put much stock into anecdotal evidence. But what about an anecdote that is backed up by radar evidence that suggests something was indeed in the air in the right place at the right time according to the report? Isn't that a big stride toward taking these reports--these stories--and propping them up with hard, physical facts?

 

[SPX]

I wonder what the prosaic explanation is for the person who told me that they saw an object move hundreds of yards in a few seconds to hover soundlessly over his and his girl friend's head on the beach? It was close enough for him to see a large elongated diamond shaped black object with details on its surface.

Yeah, these are the kind of reports that interest me the most. Because I think that if someone says they saw "a city in the sky" or, in this case, a diamond-shaped, clearly physical object, then you can rule out the planet Venus as the explanation.

Trying to explain away these kinds of very specific, very detailed reports with mundane explanations is akin to telling someone who reported seeing a bear run down the street in the middle of downtown that they were mistaken, it was actually atmospheric conditions.

At the end of the day, you're basically only left with a couple of possibilities: they're lying or they were hallucinating (the latter of which is virtually ruled out when you have multiple witnesses).