UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

Thanks!

Sorry if that confused you. I don't have a source for the 99.99% figure, of course. You can read "99.99%" as "the vast majority" if you prefer.

Nobody can actually keep tabs on every UFO report that is filed, so we can't put definite numbers on the ones that are later identified and the ones that aren't. Typically, we don't get to hear about all the cases where people mistake the planet Venus for an alien spaceship, because they don't make for very interesting news copy.

If you want to dispute my claim and assert, say, that the majority of UFO sightings are in the "difficult" category, by all means go ahead and make your case. Then we can discuss. Otherwise, I've just apologised that I confused you and we can move on. Okay?

Which pilots? All pilots who have reported UFOs and discussed (often in public media) what they believe them to have been?

Not quite right. I have consistently doubted such claims because there has never been very good evidence establishing that they are true. It's usually just guesses and eyeballed estimates when it comes to speeds, sizes and so on of reported UFOs.

If you have some good evidence, by all means present it. But we're now 6000 posts into this thread and so far you've come up with nothing very convincing. If you had something, my guess is that you might have found some motivation to post it before now. I could be wrong. Maybe you'll produce something useful in your next post. I won't hold my breath.

They don't know what they saw! You said it yourself! You said you don't know of any extraterrestrial claims that pilots made about UAPS, remember?

As for me, I have only claimed what I can back up with evidence, nothing more. Unlike you.

 

wegs,

I doubt that he makes his living from that, though. Most authors don't make a living from the books they write; the ones who do are the exception rather than the rule.

It seems to me that you're making assumptions about his biases (and about the biases skeptics may or may not have in general).

I suggest that the best thing to do would be to to read what skeptics write, listen to what they say, and then complain about any actual bias that you detect. That's better than just assuming that skeptics will be biased, based on a prejudice against skeptics.

Can you provide any example of something that West has published (said or written) that suggests clear bias on his part? Or are you just assuming that he must be biased because none of his UFO investigations has shown that a UFO is actually an alien spaceship or a time traveller or a ghost? Have you considered that the reason for that might not be because he is biased, but rather because nobody has managed to produce any good evidence of aliens etc. from a competent, honest investigation?

That's an argument about vested interests. Applying it to published skeptics - including, presumably, people like me who "publish" on internet discussion forums - it amounts to an accusation that we skeptics stand somehow to benefit from promoting a biased and unfair position on UFOs. Therefore, we are willing to lie or tell only part of the truth in order to protect our own interests, in a similar way that cigarette companies are willing to lie about the dangers of smoking to protect their incomes.

Your specific assertion is that Mick West - and, by extension, other skeptics such as myself - have "tuned out" some reasonable arguments showing that aliens are real (or time travellers, or ghosts or whatever).

Which particular reasonable arguments, then, do you say haven't been given a fair hearing by the skeptics? Are you thinking of anything in particular?

Realise that this isn't about me being defensive as a skeptic. As a skeptic, I'm wary about biases, including my own. So, if I'm tuning something out, unfairly, I will be grateful for having that pointed out clearly, so I can avoid that bias in future. I don't think I can say the same about certain UFO believers, some of whom are here on this forum. Those guys get all upset when their biases are exposed, but they never take responsibility for them and they never do anything to address the problem. The much more common response is to ignore, to ridicule or to try to distract, I find.

My impression is that in the immediate aftermath of the relevant incidents, the pilots were "genuine" and had no particular agenda. Now, having presumably made quite a bit of money from shopping their stories around, some of them might well have developed an "agenda". But I don't know. Maybe they do all the interviews purely out of a sense of altruism and a desire to get the truth, despite appearances of potential conflicts of interest.

Okay. Good. We're on the same page, if that's the case.

I always read up to date in the thread before I respond. Even though you may have addressed some questions in responding to other people, and even though other people might have raised some of the the same points I am raising, I still often prefer to respond in my own way to posts, rather than leaving things out. I think that makes for less chance of confusion about what I think about things, what I agree with (or whom) and what I don't agree with. You're not by any means obliged to respond to (or even read) everything I write.

 

wegs:

Of course. The issue is not whether eyewitness reports count as evidence. They do. The issue is with how reliably such reports point to a conclusion that what was reported was (a) accurately perceived; (b) accurately reported; (c) accurately interpreted.

I would rather than things not be left to questions of whom to trust. This is why corroborating evidence - from multiple reliable sources if possible - is so important, especially when we're dealing with claims of the unprecedented or extraordinary.

We don't have to decide to just accept an eyewitness's opinion that she saw an alien spaceship, or decide to just accept a skeptic's opinion that the witness saw the planet Venus and mistook it for an alien spaceship. We should examine any independent evidence that points in the direction of one or the other conclusion. But if, in the end, there's simply not enough strong evidence to decide either way, then it is perfectly acceptable to sit on the fence and not "decide who to believe" until better evidence (or a more convincing analysis of the existing evidence) is available.

I don't think they would.

Again, the implication of what you've written here seems to be that you think that skeptics such as myself (or Mick West, or whoever) have not taken claims of UAPs seriously, or put effort into a genuine investigation.

If taking the claims seriously means that one has to simply accept them at face value, I'd say there's a clear bias there. This, by the way, is exactly Magical Realist's constant refrain. He says we should all just accept any interpretation that an eyewitness wants to attach to his or her UFO sighting, because, apparently, maintaining a healthy skepticism is somehow disrespectful to the eyewitness (not to mention to True Believers in aliens etc.). But rational eyewitnesses ought to be able to agree that they aren't infallible observers. Nobody is a walking video recorder. Human perception and memory are imperfect. Human interpretation itself is subject to unconscious biases.

If there's something in particular that you feel skeptics have not taken seriously enough, or investigated in a genuine way, and you think they (we) should, please let me know what it is. Then we can talk about the actual issue, rather than some general perception that important evidence hasn't been given a fair hearing.

Again, your claim seems to be that skeptics are somehow trying to prevent UAP investigations, or investigating in a dishonest or superficial way, rather than in a thorough and unbiased way. If you're thinking of something specific where skeptics are at fault, I think it would be better to talk about the specifics rather than make vague accusations of bias, sloppiness or lack of due respect.

It might also be helpful to consider what kinds of investigations the UFO believers have made. How genuine have their investigations been? How thorough? How many possibilities have they investigated that do not fit their "alien spaceships" narrative? What, for example, has Magical Realist investigated? (I can't think of anything in MR's case.)

If you have watched any of Mick West's videos, though, you will see that they don't discuss previous life experiences of pilots and the like. West's analysis of a tic tac video is all about what's in the video. It does not concern the life stories of the pilots who took the video.

You call this a "blind spot". But how is the previous experience of the pilots relevant? It is certainly not relevant to analysing the images that appear in a video. It is only relevant if you are trying to decide a question like "whose opinion should I trust - the pilots, who believe they saw something extraordinary, or West, who believes that the object in the video might be a bird [say]?" But, as I have said many times, this shouldn't have to be a question of who you trust more. Let the evidence speak for itself. Separate out what is conjecture from what can actually be independently confirmed. If a pilot says the UFO accelerated from rest to supersonic speed in a heartbeat, is that just the pilot's opinion, or is there some other evidence to support the pilot's interpretation? Did a radar independently measure the speed of the object? Can we use camera footage taken from the aircraft to confirm or refute the pilot's claim? etc. This is the sort of question that West in interested in tackling. He is not concerned with trying to guess at whether the pilots seem trustworthy. Besides, even if the pilots are paragons of unimpeachable virtue, it doesn't mean they are perfect observers who can't make mistakes.

I didn't say that. This is a response to you writing "the term 'unidentified' seems to be a bit taboo". That puzzles me. To whom is the term 'unidentified' a taboo, in your opinion?

Is there any skeptic posting in this thread, for example, who has not freely admitted that some UAPs remain unidentified? We all seem to agree that the "tic tacs" have not yet been identified, for instance. So where's the 'taboo'? Whose taboo is it?

 

(continued...)

You might be moving past it, but people like Magical Realist are still immovably stuck. MR is the guy, remember, who has decided that there's an unknown superhuman species living at the bottom of an ocean somewhere. If that's not a wildly exaggerated claim based on the flimsiest of evidence, I don't know what is.

To my knowledge, nobody here has claimed that the pilots' testimony is irrelevant.

Yes, of course. Nobody knows for sure, yet. But you appreciate, I hope, that we're a very long way from anybody knowing it was aliens.

I'm not sure that's what they are doing any more. It might have been how they started out.

Having said that, in the tic tac case there are really only a few people who keep popping up on TV and in the sensational press. Presumably, there would have been a lot of other military personnel on hand who could say something useful about the "tic tac" incidents if they wanted to, but those people, for the most part, aren't coming forward. I'm sure you can think of a lot of possible reasons why they might not want to do that. Might I suggest that one reason that tends not to get much attention from the Believer Brigade is that those people might not think the "tic tac" incident was particularly remarkable or conclusive about anything extraordinarily unusual going on.

Well, compare and contrast:

On the one hand, we have the Believer Brigade, whose "goal" is to get viewers of the video to assume that what is seen in the video can't possibly be anything "mundane". The Believers haven't done any actual analysis of the video, for the most part. Their argument, such as it is, relies largely on accepting the interpretations of various people who were proximately involved when the video was made.

On the other hand, we have skeptics, whose "goal" is to extract as much useful objective information out of the video as they can so that we can all think critically about the range of things that might plausibly account for what is seen in the video. That process also necessarily involves eliminating some impossible explanations - something that can work either for or against "mundane" explanations and also, I might add, something that few Believers ever make any effort to do. If the skeptics end up saying "Well, it could be a previously-unknown alien species controlling a previously-unknown spacecraft, but it could also be a bird", and the Believers are unable to either rule out the bird option or prove the spacecraft explanation, then how is what the skeptics are doing a bad thing, exactly?

In neither case is the thing "explained". That would require a watertight ID on the thing. But I'm still not seeing this 'taboo' you're talking about. Where is it?

The only thing "debunked" here, by the way, is the false notion that the tic tac can only be something "non-mundane". If you don't think that notion is debunked sufficiently by now, I think you need to explain why [and, by "you", here, I obviously mean to include people who like Magical Realist, who never have anything substantial to contribute to these discussions].

Apparently. It does make me wonder how many Mick Wests work at the Pentagon. Maybe they ought to hire one or two.

For now, sure.

 

I didn't say it can't be true!

What I wrote was this: "If that's not a wildly exaggerated claim based on the flimsiest of evidence, I don't know what is."

In other words, I do not accept your claim because there is no pursuasive evidence that supports it. That has nothing to do with incredulity.

Do you understand the distinction?

Fine, but they could show you abundant evidence that supports that claim. Provided that you could understand the evidence and how it proves the claim, you would have no rational reason to reject the claim after being made aware of the evidence.

There's no evidence for that, either. It's just an exaggerated wish-fulfilment fantasy, at this point.

Heh. How ironic that is, coming from you.

 

That's a great article, with the quoted report saying very sensible things. Essentially, the authors of that report are saying exactly the same things that I (and other "skeptics" in this thread) have been saying all along.

Why can't the US government explain 143 out of 144 cases of UAPS reported by military planes? The answer is right there in the headline: "...blames limited data".

In other words, there just isn't enough evidence available to enable the investigators to draw definite conclusions about what the various "sightings" were actually of.

Here are some other grab-lines from the article. Bold highlights are mine. Quotes are indented; my comments are not.

That report, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence ... said it didn't have adequate data to put all but one of them into a category.
​

Keeping an open mind, until better data/analysis comes along. Tick.

....
"In a limited number of incidents, UAP reportedly appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics. These observations could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception and require additional rigorous analysis," the report said.
​

Keeping multiple competing hypotheses in play until they can be ruled out. Advocating rigorous analysis. Tick.

....
A senior U.S. government official said ahead of the report's release Friday that, "We have no clear indications that there is any nonterrestrial explanation for them — but we will go wherever the data takes us."
​

Keeping an open mind to follow the evidence where it leads. But no good evidence for "nonterrestrial" causes (yet). Tick.

The official added: “We do not have any data that indicates that any of these unidentified air phenomena are part of a foreign collection program nor do we have any data that is indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary."
​

More possibilities for "mundane" explanations, but nothing even suggestive of advanced technology being developed by "a potential adversary" so far.

...officials told NBC News the government had not ruled out the possibility that the flying objects seen by U.S. military planes were highly advanced aircraft developed by other nations. These officials also said that the objects did not appear to be evidence of secret U.S. technology, but didn't definitively rule that out, either.
​

More possible explanations that remain live. Keeping an open mind. But this is the US government saying these things aren't secret US technology. Unless they are so secret that the government is keeping secrets from itself (ooh err, can you say conspiracy theory, kids?)

“There is a wide, wide range of phenomena that we observe that are ultimately put into the UAP category. There is not one single explanation for UAP, it’s rather a series of things," the senior U.S. official said Friday.
​

There is not a single explanation, but rather a series of things. Tick. Lots of UFO Believers seem to forget this obvious fact. Some UFOs turn out to be weather balloons. Some turn out to be mistaken sightings of the planet Venus. So far, none have been confirmed to be sightings of extraterrestrials, advanced foreign technology, secret US technology, ghosts, time travellers, superhuman aliens from the deep ocean, flying Bigfoot monsters, or any other "woo".

 

That's a very good point. MR claims that these things are seen all the time. So why are there only two or three videos of them doing the rounds of the internet? There should be huge amounts of "raw data" to investigate, if MR's claims are true.

But, instead, what we get are ad hoc excuses and special pleadings and convenient assumptions, like this:

Note usual wishful thinking. MR doesn't know that the US Navy has lots of UAP videos; he just wishes that they did. Because none have come to light, MR needs to invent an excuse. Oh, they're all classified and can't be shown to anybody unless you're in the secret military UFO club. Why are they classified? Well, nobody knows, but it's for one reason or another!

It's not clear who doesn't want their capabilities to be given to the enemy, or who the enemy even is. Paranoid UFO nuts always need enemies, and will invent them if there's no evidence of them.