I think that many people enjoy the mystery behind not being able to prove something with objective evidence, but believing it just the same.
I think that many people embrace and value the idea that the universe is still mysterious at its core, that it still has the power to surprise us. I most definitely feel that way myself. It's what's motivated my lifelong interest in philosophy. It's the idea that we don't currently understand every aspect of the reality around us and opposition to the idea that everything that exists (or that can
possibly exist) already has its own little conceptual box into which it can be dismissed and made safe by those who imagine that they have everything figured out and themselves to be masters (at least conceptually) of all that is and all that can possibly be.
When it comes to UFO's like the tic tac video, when does the science community take eye witness ''testimonies'' as valid?
I'm not convinced that there is a single "science community" that adopts a single opinion on things like this. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists out there (or however many there are) and I'd expect a wide variety of views. One problem with these latest "UAP" data (the 144 cases or the 80 of them that were observed by multiple media) is that almost all of the details are classified. They have a lot of data that has never leaked and that they aren't releasing. About all that outsiders like us have to go on is the preliminary assessment that they released publicly. And their preliminary 'conclusion' is essentially what I was arguing for earlier in the thread regarding the tic-tacs: That something appears to have been there and they don't know what it was. (Amazing how much resistance that rather innocuous idea has received.)
I mean, if something like that happens only once...but a few intelligent, critical thinkers manage to capture it on film, how can it ever be ''proven?''
Yes, that's an objection to the simplistic school-book descriptions of scientific method that require repeatable controlled experiments. Some sorts of phenomena don't lend themselves to that kind of approach. They are unique events, one-offs that can't be reproduced on demand in a laboratory. About all that science can do is observe them on their schedule whenever they do decide to happen. So what we get are observation reports along with whatever instrumental data might have been brought to bear.
At this point, I feel we're on a carousel with this thread
Yes, that's why I've more or less checked out of this thread. It's going in circles and is just repeating things said 50 pages ago. It is a fascinating topic though, on so many levels, so I keep looking in.
because I'm sure I've asked that question before in so many words, and you have replied. lol But, as we dig deeper, is the answer that eye witness testimonies never suffice as proof?
I prefer not to use the word "proof". Proofs are only found in mathematics and logic. And there, only in tremendously simplified abstract situations where the truth of premises is assumed and rules of inference explicitly defined. Very artificial. Real life is far more complex.
What eye-witness testimonies are is
evidence. Eye-witness testimony is probably the most common kind of evidence introduced in legal trials.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre
Why do we allow eye witnesses to take the stand in criminal trials, then? Sometimes, those witnesses are what an entire legal case is built on.
Precisely because they are evidence. But they aren't proof. There's no suggestion that what the witness says must necessarily be true. But it's presumably true unless it is rebutted somehow, by contradictory evidence of some kind. Then it's up to the jury to decide what they find most credible.
In this thread we have Fravor's account, some leaked video, and the UAP Preliminary Assessment. And we have a whole lot of attempts to rebut that rather fragmentary body of evidence. Almost all of the rebuttals are merely speculations, assertions that this or that aspect
might have been due to this or that. We haven't seen any convincing evidence that those aspects were in fact those alternative explanations (perceptual errors, cavorting whales, flocks of birds, radar glitches, untrained operators...) only that in the imaginations of some people, they
might have been. Apart from JamesR's rather weak statistical argument, I haven't seen any attempt to explain how all of these (purely speculative) faults came together and cohered (the "comedy of errors" theory) in such a way as to create the false impression that something was there that really wasn't.
I think that a good part of the "skeptics" motivation in this thread is the underlying (false) idea that UFO/UAP means 'alien spaceship', combined with the
a-priori assumption that 'alien spaceship' is such an outlandish idea that it can't be true. So q.e.d., UFO/UAP's can't be real. And that in turn seems to justify the idea that the mere
speculative possibility of any alternative explanation, regardless of whether there is any evidence for it, and regardless of the consilience objection, must be more likely than the idea that the UFO/UAP was real.