And I could just as easily respond your reply was a c*** thing to say. Worthless opinions from a self-confessed alcoholic should be kept to yourself.
UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?
- Thread starter Magical Realist
- Start date
But then you would say that. Keeping on side with forum hierarchy has benefits.
But, you also must admit that it was a dick thing to say.
Not at all. Are you incapable of recognizing and acknowledging James R's underhanded tactics exhibited often here?!
Walk me through it.
Firstly - you tell me - have you or have you not been closely following this thread for a long time? Maybe from day zero?
Let's say I'm looking for alien life but I don't think there's been definitive proof of it.
OK you have a position that I think is too limited in scope but then we are all individuals with unique viewpoints so to each their own.
And that's where i prefer to leave this round of posts. Opening fresh scabs regarding other issues doesn't achieve anything positive.
But then again, I may be the only one to listen to you.
A depressing thought!
Bye.
foghorn
Valued Senior Member
But, with the US Navy events would you say...
What better way is there to let foreign adversaries using ''collection platforms'', know US Navy surveillance capabilities, than by the US publishing all of its own instrument and personnel observations of those events?
Since the ''foreign adversaries'' know their own ''craft'' flight capabilities, it isn't really a problem for the US Government to let US pilots talk about what they ''saw''.
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Yazata
Valued Senior Member
I think that you enjoy it as a kind of sport. That was obvious in your endless page-after-page-after-page battles with Jan Ardena that often took over entire threads on the religion forum. And what's more, I think that you love the feeling of self-righteousness that you get when you slay "ufo-nuts" and similar demons.
I'm not particularly interested in battling you, James. I popped back into this thread a couple of days ago after an absence because I saw that Q-reeus had posted about the UAP Preliminary Assessment. I found the document interesting and wanted to discuss it.
I think that part of our difference there is that your "real objects" typically seem to be things like flights of birds, breaching whales or ice crystals in the atmosphere. Elementary misperceptions and instrumental misdetections of extremely mundane things. Which seems to me to be another way of arguing that there was never a real physical 'UAP' there in the first place. Unfortunately, it suggests that highly experienced military aviators are fools and the best detection equipment available is little more than junk. And it never addresses my 'consilience' argument which I think is quite strong.
My "real objects" run more towards 'There was really something there that the radar and infrared detected, the pilots visually saw and the cameras photographed'. I get the strong impression that the UAP Preliminary Assessment is interpreting "real objects" in roughly the same way that I do. They implicitly acknowledge the 'consilience' argument as their reason for thinking that UAPs are real physical objects (the majority of them were detected through multiple physical modes).
Yes, the Preliminary Assessment repeately makes the point that they need more and better information. Hence a greater effort within the military to harvest these reports. Along with efforts to combat the stigma and ridicule associated with making them. They mention doing AI searches of archived FAA air traffic control radar data and similar big-data efforts. And they don't seem to be drawing any conclusions beyond 'Something seems to have been out there on multiple occasions and we don't know what it was'. They do present the very sensible hypothesis that there were multiple sorts of things that perhaps have multiple kinds of explanations.
That's probably true. (How true depends on what dataset we are discussing.) Remember that we aren't talking about the entire Things Seen in the Sky myths dating back to prehistoric times. The experimental aircraft hypothesis was advanced by me earlier in the thread specifically in reference to the 'tic-tac' sightings. I believe that the UAP Preliminary Assessment is only addressing their limited dataset of 144 recent US government sightings.
The DoD's UAPTF admits that only a small amount of their data supports a hypothesis of "breakthrough technology" and they also say that additional "rigorous analysis" is necessary to justify and interpret that data.
So I prefer to follow their lead and avoid drawing premature conclusions.
We are talking about the UAP Preliminary Assessment, we aren't talking about some sort of battle with "ufo nuts". We shouldn't import any preexisting biases into our consideration of this new information.
The argument from chance doesn't seem to me to be consistent with the UAPTF saying that 80 of their 144 cases involved detection by multiple modalities.
Yes, but their "appeared to show" might not be entirely consistent with your "I also don't think there any really good evidence for any sighted object performing in excess of the current state of aviation engineering." (A great deal is riding on the meaning of "really good" in "really good evidence" there.)
"Appeared to show" obviously doesn't imply 'shows conclusively', let alone 'proves'. But it does seem to suggest the existence of 'evidence for'. Perhaps not conclusive evidence, but something that demands more analysis and if at all possible, corroboration.
As I recall, you were throwing a hissy fit about my getting it right as to whether you believe in conspiracy theories or not. But when I ask you directly about conspiracy theories, for the record, you hedge and dodge and wimp out.
You're really just looking for excuses to maintain your rage at this point, aren't you? You're not seriously concerned that I've misunderstood you. Perhaps what you're really upset about is just how well I understand you.
I don't think I've stated that. It seems that a lot of them are. You seem to be, for instance, but for whatever reason you're unwilling to own your own views.
You don't like me asking yourself or Magical Realist direct questions about your views? Why is that? Are you, like Magical Realist, afraid to stand up for what you believe?
You have no idea what civil discourse is, Q-reeus, so you're utterly unable to recognise it when you see it. Why don't you do something more productive than spouting your bile all the time?
Rubbish. MR was the one who got all defensive about the conspiracy comment and decided to make an issue of it, as you are well aware.
Back in your box, Q-reeus.
Such irony. Such hypocrisy. Tirelessly repeated. Please - go back to your crypt for another extended holiday - preferably indefinitely extended.
Yazata,
Even you have become more entrenched over time in your sympathies with the woo. You seem to be digging in and choosing a side. I've always thought of you as one of our more stable, sensible, members.
It is strange that you imply that a flight of birds, say, cannot be a "real physical UAP". Until a flight of birds is identified as such (to a high probability), it is a UAP, by definition.
Don't fall into Magical Realist's silly trap of labelling something a UFO only once you've already decided that it an extraordinary "craft" with "pilots" that fly it with "impossible" flight characteristics. Notice that for people like him, there are only really two categories of sightings: those that have been shown persuasively to be mundane objects, and space aliens (caveat: insert whatever woo he is pushing today). There is no middle ground of "not positively IDed as anything yet", for him.
Regarding the military aviators you mention, it is not necessary that they all be fools or liars, though no doubt some are. People make mistakes. Human perception is not perfect. Memory is malleable and unreliable. Group think is a thing. And so on and so forth, through all the foibles of humanity.
I have addressed your "consilience" argument. I disagree with you that is strongly suggestive of a non-mundane origin for UAPs. On the contrary, I think that it's essentially an argument from ignorance ("I can't think of a mundane explanation for them, so they are probably extraordinary").
Again, I would like to re-iterate that from the point of view of a skeptic, there is no pre-existing conclusion for any particular sighting. Skeptics, unlike True Believers, understand that evidence and analysis comes before conclusions, not after them.
I do tend to push back against people who are unwilling to agree to any common ground, or to admit the possibility that they could be wrong. I also tend to strongly push back against people who prefer making ad hominem attacks over having a civil discussion. There's nothing worse than an arrogant know-it-all.
At one time, Jan Ardena appeared to be amenable to rational argument. It took me a while to discover that he's basically a troll. Still, not a complete waste of time since his antics helped me to find more efficient ways to refute certain types of religious nonsense.
Do you think I've managed to slay any of our most celebrated UFO nuts here? I don't think so. In my opinion, they have tended to do what True Believers do whenever they are asked to think: to double down on bad arguments and to try to substitute personal anger and ad hominem attacks for reasoned argument, in the hope that their readers won't be able to tell the difference.
Even you have become more entrenched over time in your sympathies with the woo. You seem to be digging in and choosing a side. I've always thought of you as one of our more stable, sensible, members.
I think I've been pretty clear on where I stand on these "real objects". I have never once tried to make a definite claim that any UAP is a flight of birds, a breaching whale etc. unless the evidence unambiguously points to such a conclusion. What I have said, in regards to some specific sightings, is that elements of them are consistent with such explanations. The onus of proof, remember, is not on me to disprove the alien spaceship hypothesis. The onus is on those who allege the alien spaceships (or supernatural time travellers, or whatever) to bring sufficient evidence to supports their conclusion.
It is strange that you imply that a flight of birds, say, cannot be a "real physical UAP". Until a flight of birds is identified as such (to a high probability), it is a UAP, by definition.
Don't fall into Magical Realist's silly trap of labelling something a UFO only once you've already decided that it an extraordinary "craft" with "pilots" that fly it with "impossible" flight characteristics. Notice that for people like him, there are only really two categories of sightings: those that have been shown persuasively to be mundane objects, and space aliens (caveat: insert whatever woo he is pushing today). There is no middle ground of "not positively IDed as anything yet", for him.
Regarding the military aviators you mention, it is not necessary that they all be fools or liars, though no doubt some are. People make mistakes. Human perception is not perfect. Memory is malleable and unreliable. Group think is a thing. And so on and so forth, through all the foibles of humanity.
I have addressed your "consilience" argument. I disagree with you that is strongly suggestive of a non-mundane origin for UAPs. On the contrary, I think that it's essentially an argument from ignorance ("I can't think of a mundane explanation for them, so they are probably extraordinary").
I explicitly acknowledged this point in my previous post to you. I said I agree, remember?
I discussed all this above, too.
Yes. That's one hypothesis. I don't think it's a necessary one, given the data, but it is a possibility - unlikely but possible, as I said.
Okay. I wasn't aware of the limited nature of the assessment, if that's the case. I thought the report might be looking back through the archives in general.
That sounds quite sensible. The only caveat I would add is that the same data supports numerous alternative hypotheses just as strongly (arguably more strongly) than the "breakthrough technology" hypothesis. If I had to bet, I know where I'd be putting my money. Fortunately, I don't have to bet. I can just wait for better data and/or analysis. In the meantime, it's okay not to know.
You're naive if you think that the military's publication of their UFO investigations will not interact with the existing beliefs of the UFO nuts. Those people will grab at any straw they can find to prop up their pre-existing belief system, and will crow about it loudly as they do so.
Again, I would like to re-iterate that from the point of view of a skeptic, there is no pre-existing conclusion for any particular sighting. Skeptics, unlike True Believers, understand that evidence and analysis comes before conclusions, not after them.
Those 144 cases are a biased sample selected from the full set of UFO reports, though. They are unusual from the start, in that they appear to have more reliable kinds of evidence (those highly trained witnesses and "best detection equipment" that you mentioned previously) that the usually run-of-the-mill UFO sighting reports. They have also been culled from a much larger set of sightings that were "solved", either after official investigation or (more often) long before any official investigation was considered to be warranted. As such, those 144 cases are the outliers, not the norm. But even here, we seem to have uncovered 64 cases where the "evidence" is based on a "single modality", perhaps a single eyewitness or instrument detection. It just shows you what happens once you start investigating these things in a systematic, sensible way.
The vast majority of the extraordinary speeds and accelerations that a reports for UFOs are based solely on eyewitness estimates. A small number are reliant on measuring instruments that are not always reliable or subject to interpretation. Apart from these kinds of estimates of speed and acceleration, there really is no other evidence for extraordinary aviation performance in these UFOs.
Lots of things might potentially be "evidence for" all kinds of quite different things, though. Just because a piece of evidence is consistent with explanation A (A for "aliens", say) or explanation B (B for "breakthrough technologies", say) doesn't mean that explanations A and B are the right ones. If the evidence is also consistent with explanations C through Z (covering faulty equipment, mistaken eyewitnesses, deliberate fraud, etc. etc.), then the evidence, by itself, is not convincingly pointing to anything in particular as The Explanation. To assume that A or B is more likely than K or W is to make a mistake of reasoning, without anything more.
Empty, time-wasting nonsense from you, as usual.
Meanwhile, I'm discussing the topic with Yazata.
What are you going to discuss with Yazata , James R ?