UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

Magical Realist said:
Yes they do. That the eyewitnesses' account of the UAP is confirmed on radar rules out observer error on the part of the eyewitness or any thing else that radar can't pick up. And that the eyewitnesses saw the object rules out a glitch or a bogey on the radar. The confirmation of the two information sources together by each other strengthens their individual plausibility taken separately.
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DaveC426913 said:
This is literally self-contradictory.

If they are taken separately that means they are not taken together. You can't have it both ways.
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A single observation report taken alone might be subject to all sorts of possible (if unlikely) faults, ranging from spurious radar return, to operator error, to camera glitches, to perceptual errors in eye-witnesses. The "skeptics" take great pleasure in listing these possible sources of error, and then the UAP sightings are dismissed as what they call a "comedy of errors". (Despite there never having been any evidence that any of these errors actually occurred, just the speculation that they might have.)

But a collection of observation reports, by multiple observers using different modalities, that all converge in seeming to indicate the same thing corroborate each other. The point being that despite the fact that each observation modality is subject to its own particular problems, the likelihood that all of the observers and all of the modalities were experiencing their own separate faults that just happened to falsely support all of the other observers' errors, is far lower than the likelihood of an individual observer alone was making some kind of mistake. Generally speaking, in the case of mistakes we would expect the mistaken report to be an outlier, to not be consistent with the others.

This is the same principle that underlies scientific verification.
 
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Magical Realist said:
Here are some photos of ufos taken many years ago long before photoshop. Just two pages but some interesting images nonetheless:

https://www.granger.com/results.asp?txtkeys1=UFO
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In case there was any doubt that no filter is bring applied any longer, here is a smattering of samples from the front page of that link. I submit the possibility that someone's gotten a savvy friend to set up a bot to Google: UFO and auto-post the results directly to this thread without human oversight.

A sci-fi film:

upload_2021-11-3_13-11-58.png

A person (and a hoaxer):

upload_2021-11-3_13-12-24.png


A wayward finger:

upload_2021-11-3_13-13-45.png

A B-26 Marauder:

upload_2021-11-3_13-28-4.png
 
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Please don't post useless nonsense to sciforums.
DaveC426913 said:
In case there was any doubt that no filter is bring applied any longer, here is a smattering of samples from the front page of that link. I submit the possibility that someone's gotten a savvy friend to set up a bot to Google: UFO and auto-post the results directly to this thread without human oversight.

A sci-fi film:

View attachment 4502

A person (and a hoaxer):

View attachment 4503


A wayward finger:

View attachment 4504

A B-26 Marauder:

View attachment 4505
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I rely on posters to filter out the BS examples on their own. If they can't do that, then they are beyond my help.
 
Magical Realist said:
I rely on posters to filter out the BS examples on their own. If they can't do that, then they are beyond my help.
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Thanks for confirming that.

You admit you post what you call "BS", without applying your own filter, and expect others to do that for you, and make no attempt at discussion.
As in: no better than a bot that searches on keywords and posts to a personal blog.

:reported:
 
You admit you post what you call "BS", without applying your own filter, and expect others to do that for you, and make no attempt at discussion.
As in: no better than a bot that searches on keywords and posts to a personal blog.

:reported:
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Liar. I didn't say I posted any BS. I'm saying, as in this case, that when I post a link to a given website, the posters who go there should be able to filter out any BS they find there. Just as you did by reading the photos' captions. See? That wasn't so hard was it?
 
Magical Realist said:
I rely on posters to filter out the BS examples on their own. If they can't do that, then they are beyond my help.
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Moderator note:

Magical Realist was previously warned that he should do some preliminary analysis before posting nonsense. Another warning has been issued as a reminder of what behaviour is and is not appropriate here.
 
LOL The skeptics are on the war path again, this time about some old photos of ufos. "How dare you post evidence for ufos in a thread about evidence for ufos!" Meh...and so the thread goes on.
 
What kind of 'analysis' should participants in these 'fringe' forums should be doing, in order to avoid ban-threats? We need more specificity about the intellectual standards that we are supposed to meet.

And why are some individuals seemingly being given carte-blanche to post sarcasm, insults and snark without a word of rebuke? Shouldn't the same intellectual standards apply to all?

Is it really a matter of whose 'side' people appear to be lining up with? Sometimes it seems to be.

My interest in this thread lies with the philosophical issues that it raises. It provides excellent examples of principles from the philosophy of science, epistemology more generally, the definition of buzz-words like 'logic' and 'critical thinking', and all sorts of issues. All in real life context and application. Even underlying metaphysics, as in what kind of objects and events that one a-priori assumes are really out there.

The cases that most interest me are largely the 2004 and 2015 "tic-tac" sightings and the ideas that are contained in the 'UAP Preliminary Assessment'. These provide (what little has been publicly released) what I think are among the best UFO sightings that I'm personally aware of. Multiple trained observers, multiple angles, multiple highly sophisticated detection modalities specifically designed to detect unknown flying objects.

My own view is basically the same as the Preliminary Assessment, that something very unusual seems to have been happening there, and at this point nobody knows what it was.

I tend to oppose what appear to me to be premature attempts to slam the door on the very idea. Intelligent counterarguments are fine, but I have to say that none of them (such as Joe nickell's "comedy of errors" speculations) have seemed very persuasive to me so far.

Regarding MR's cases, I don't pay a whole lot of attention to them. If anyone is feeling "triggered" by them, control your emotions, maintain your intellectual stability and just concentrate on what you judge to be the best cases.

It probably would help if MR gave us a little information about why he is posting them and what conclusions he thinks should be drawn from them. Or if he hasn't drawn any conclusions and just finds them fascinating and perplexing, then say that. That would probably come closest to my own opinion I guess. In most of these examples, there probably isn't enough information about them to draw firm conclusions. But some do display interesting features. So MR should point out what he takes those features to be.
 
'Critical thinking' can very easily become a unexamined self-serving slogan. It's not something that one should use as a rhetorical club to berate others, but something that one must display in their own thinking. Perhaps one needs to exercise some critical thinking about 'critical thinking' (the academic subject).
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Going solely by the skeptics' example, you'd think that part of critical thinking is a self-serving excuse to ridicule and flame and humiliate others who allegedly aren't performing it. That's a clue that it isn't what it's touted to be since the critical thinking should be successfully demonstrating its superiority on its own. But it isn't. It's only confirming its failure to even arrive at anything resembling a truly objective stance on the matter. If anyone is demonstrating true critical thinking here it is you Yazata. I appreciate you taking the time to post here. It is a breath of fresh air in an atmosphere of blatant arrogance and bullying and hubris.
 
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Yazata said:
What kind of 'analysis' should participants in these 'fringe' forums should be doing, in order to avoid ban-threats? We need more specificity about the intellectual standards that we are supposed to meet.

And why are some individuals seemingly being given carte-blanche to post sarcasm, insults and snark without a word of rebuke? Shouldn't the same intellectual standards apply to all?

Is it really a matter of whose 'side' people appear to be lining up with? Sometimes it seems to be.
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Whom?
 
In most of these examples, there probably isn't enough information about them to draw firm conclusions. But some do display interesting features. So MR should point out what he takes those features to be.
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Often it is a question of what more can be said about a ufo account that isn't said in the excerpt or the video or website itself. Since I basically seek out and post those that are most self-explanatory, any commentary comes off as uselessly redundant. But, seeing there is such hysteria here over new evidence, I suppose I can say more about them than I have. A comforting prelude to unsettling information. "Here's a video..blah blah blah.."
 
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Yazata said:
What kind of 'analysis' should participants in these 'fringe' forums should be doing, in order to avoid ban-threats? We need more specificity about the intellectual standards that we are supposed to meet.
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I disagree. As an example: you seem to be managing quite well. You know intuitively how to analyze without getting ban threats. So it can be done. In fact I'd say it's far more the rule than the exception.

There are only two members here who are having difficulty with it. And I'd say they show zero interest in learning, even with your example to follow.

I reject your suggestion that it's the forum that needs to change merely for the sake of two members who are widely and historically well-known for their vexatious ways.
 
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