That's improper procedure.
"Combining all of it together" is a case of assuming the conclusion in your premise - that they're all the same thing.
We have radar returns, we have eye-witness accounts and we have camera imagery. "Combining it all together" means taking it all into account and trying to produce an explanation that accounts for all the elements. As opposed to trying to account for each of them individually, which leaves the problem of why they all coalesced in one event.
Proper procedure is to examine each case on its own merits.
The Null Hypothesis applies here: when the goal is to establish if two things are connected - then the assumption must be that they are not connected - until they are.
Is statistical terminology relevant? We aren't trying to draw statistical inferences.
We are just noting that something was observed on radar. When aircraft were vectored to the coordinates where the radar return was located, the pilots visually observed something. And that something was recorded on video in both visual and IR.
The simplest and most parsimonious explanation would seem to be that something was really there that the radar detected and the pilots saw and recorded with their targeting pods. That's certainly how we would respond if the object in question was a ship or a conventional aircraft. The only difference in this case is that the objects in question (the tic-tacs) were more difficult to identify. But difficulty in identifying them doesn't seem to justify concluding that nothing was there.
My point was that we might be able to imagine hypothetical alternative explanations for different aspects individually. But the challenge then would be to explain why all of those observational faults were happening in concert, together at the same time at the same location.
That there is a serious, considered attempt to use proper procedures get at the truth. Contrast with "just believe". See the diff?
I'm not convinced that any set of "proper procedures" even exists in this case. If they do, then who defined them and where are they found?
And I'm certainly not saying "just believe". (In what?) My only assertion here is that these reports (the 2004 Nimitz reports and the subsequent 2015 Atlantic reports) are very good UFO reports that deserve far more than the dismissive ridicule that most of Sciforums gives them. I'd probably add that they
are evidence (even if it isn't 100% conclusive evidence... of what?) so all the '70 years, no evidence' snark is provably false. We have evidence right here. (It isn't clear what it's evidence of at this point, what its final explanation might be.)
Error in human perception, memory and recall is fact. So is error in equipment. That is the outcome of Ockham's razor.
Except that naval radars and fighter pilots are accurate more often than not. (Otherwise, why use them?) And while there's some relatively low probability that each one might individually produce a false report, all of them simultaneously doing so in such a way that all the false returns, visual illusions and camera faults that we are simply hypothesizing all coincide in one place at the same time seems far less likely.
It's more likely, certainly more parsimonious, that there was something there that the radars detected, the pilots saw and the cameras recorded.
No one is laughing anything off. We are taking this seriously - more seriously than MR, in fact - by being diligently skeptical.
Just scroll upwards and read for yourself.
Some of these are genuine mysteries that defy explanation. I doubt anyone here denies that.
It certainly looks like they do. Everyone from JamesR on down has been fighting tooth and nail against it. Your own argument seems to be based on an implicit premise that a genuine mystery, a genuine anomaly, has such a low probability of occurring that some fanciful coincidence of false radar returns, visual illusions and camera faults will be more likely.
I would perhaps modify your phrase "genuine mysteries that defy explanation" to something like 'mysteries that currently defy explanation'. I don't want to suggest that they must be inexplicable in principle. But I do want to suggest that in some small number of cases, explaining them might conceivably require some expansion in our current supply of explanatory principles, an expansion of our world-view in other words.
Unfortunately, no case has come forward that has extant hard evidence, so we can independently verify eyewitness accounts (that, while very interesting, are not incontrovertible), which means they remain unsolved. It does not mean "therefore aliens" (or whatever).
That seems to suggest a sliding scale of what counts as "hard evidence". I'd say that radar returns, eyewitness observers and the targeting pod videos all coming together to tell the same story is evidence that's just as "hard" as the evidence for pretty much anything else in life, including scientific assertions.
And keep in mind that my (very preliminary) view of all this consists of
1.
Something (that I find very interesting) seems to have really happened in objective reality.
2.
I don't currently have a clue what it was.
No need to introduce "aliens" as that's just a red-herring intended to get all the knees jerking. If we don't know what this was, then we don't know what this was. That's probably about the only interim conclusion that we are justified in making at the moment.
What we are laughing off is displays of childish hypocrisy and utter lack of knowledge about cognition, perception, memory
Those three 'cognition', 'perception', 'memory' suggest that you want to attribute a psychological explanation to these events. So what explains the radar returns and targeting pod videos that seem to corroborate precisely the interpretations (something was objectively there) that the psychological account seems designed to deny?
and how to rationally analyze mysteries.
I'm not convinced that there's any established procedure for doing that. Any attempt to define one would beg too many questions in epistemology and the philosophy of science. I'm certainly not convinced that anyone on Sciforums is qualified to tell everyone else what it is.
That is not really sincere, but is trolling.
And that's just an insult.
