Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
No I don't. Skeptics are the ones making a mockery of it. And they are responsible for their own actions.
UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?
- Thread starter Magical Realist
- Start date
No I don't. Skeptics are the ones making a mockery of it. And they are responsible for their own actions.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
This is an undefended claim; the equivalent of "nuh-uh!" Well done making my point for me.
I defended my claim that you mock the seriousness of the research into UAPS with
- your hasty conclusions from data that doesn't support them*,
- your outright rejection of perception, cognition, memory science principles**
- and your rejection of critical thinking methods***, to name just a few shortcomings.
** a matter of public record
*** a matter of public record
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
No..I only claim that ufos are of unknown origin. It is you and your fellow ilk that seize upon that to mock and ridicule me as being "unscientific". Hence your present equation of being "unscientific" with believing in "woo". It's how you justify dismissing ufo accounts before you even look into the evidence for them. If it's all woo, then there is no reason to take them seriously.
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DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Fixed this for ya:
You believe.
You believe first, then mangle your accounting of the evidence to suit your belief.
Critical thinking means to go where the evidence leads you. So far, we have eyewitness accounts of UAPs - (yes, including electronically), none of which can be examined as fresh data by independent parties. That is not sufficient to draw conclusions; certainly not while there are other explanations on the table.
Full stop.
You believe.
You believe first, then mangle your accounting of the evidence to suit your belief.
Critical thinking means to go where the evidence leads you. So far, we have eyewitness accounts of UAPs - (yes, including electronically), none of which can be examined as fresh data by independent parties. That is not sufficient to draw conclusions; certainly not while there are other explanations on the table.
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
You start with belief too, in the case of ufos, that they are all just mundane and explainable phenomena. Everyone starts with some bias, which an objective analysis of the accounts serves to counteract and correct. If you start off believing ufos to just be woo, then that bias will keep you from objectivity and rational examination. Hence it is you who is unscientific, clinging to assumptions that color everything you conclude.
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I’ve been stating this all along - everyone has bias and it can blind us to the truth - on either side of this discussion.
I guess the bare bones truth would be “we don’t have enough evidence to determine if some of these UFO’s are anything more than something mundane or potentially extraordinary.”
Well, that’s incredibly boring.
That is a huge leap from blatant dismissal on the part of skeptics. You have to take the wins where you can get them, MR. lol!!
I guess the bare bones truth would be “we don’t have enough evidence to determine if some of these UFO’s are anything more than something mundane or potentially extraordinary.”
That is a huge leap from blatant dismissal on the part of skeptics. You have to take the wins where you can get them, MR. lol!!
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Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
Generally it is in the flight behavior of uaps that we find the evidence for something extraordinary. For instance with the tic tac we have observed and radar detected speeds and maneuvers that defy anything we have in terms of aerial craft. The fact that it was starting and stopping on a dime from hypersonic speeds rule out mundane causes. All of this added to the fact that it has no wings or control surfaces nor any heat exhaust suggests a superadvanced if not otherworldly source of the phenomena.
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Yes, this one has me less skeptical because of who reported it, and the maneuvers as you say, that aren’t characteristic of something mundane, at least to the best of our knowledge. By mundane, I mean of this world but still extraordinary/advanced technology.
I’m truly not a conspiracy theorist but isn’t it odd that we don’t hear much about these claims? Definitely not on mainstream news. Not anywhere. I would believe new information that has come to light, is being purposely covered up over the “oh well, we still don’t know what it could be” narrative.
(If I were a conspiracy theorist.)
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
You know nothing of flight characteristics.
You see my point Yazata about not being serious?
MR is an example of an enthusiast who has spent a lot of his time and interest in figuring out the period garb ghosts wear, and how cyclists and pedestrians teleport, but what he has not bothered to spend his time and interest on is the basic mechanics that every school lad and lass knew about every manned rocket flight since the Moon Landings in the 70s:
(Yes, every school child who cared knew how fast orbit and re-entry is.)
He has not bothered to know or care anything about the basic physics of space or air flight that was so ubiquitous for a half century that you couldn't swing a cat without hitting it.
He doesn't know or care about the basic Newtonian mechanics of travelling in a closed container and not dying.
I've heard this before, but not in this century - or the last:
"Critics of early steam-spewing locomotives, for example, thought “that women’s bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour,” and worried that “[female passengers’] uteruses would fly out of [their] bodies as they were accelerated to that speed”—which, for the record, they did and will not.* Others suspected that any human body might simply melt at high speeds."
So, what exactly does he spend his time reading up on?? (rhetorical question)
The point here is not to bash MR, but to ask why we should put any credence in anything he says about basic aerodynamics and sonic- let alone supersonic- travel, for example.
So, is it any wonder the field is toxic to actual scientists? It's rife with profound ignorance. This has nothing to do with the the military/government or any establishment torpedoing the credibility of eyewitnesses; it has everything to do with fans - who know nothing about the basic sciences, and instead, eat up nonsense about ghosts and teleportation - wrecking it for the rest of us.
That woo-hype has to stop before any progress can be made. The old guard fanboys like MR have to pass on, and be replaced by new folk who actually have the slightest knowledge of the sciences required to take this subject seriously.
Meanwhile, us analysts bide our time, and pass that time arguing with fools.
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Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
Always with the flaming and the adhoms. A sure sign you have run out of any salient points to make.
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
Stories get told over and over again in the media and details get lost in the retelling. The media reports news in 20 second soundbytes and doesn't go into the stories it tells very deeply. There is also an almost unconscious attitude of maintaining the status quo and "business as usual" so as to not be too upsetting to the news consumers. Keep them content and happy so they continue to consume.
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I don’t know what is so threatening or scary that the news wouldn’t be able to report accurately and promptly, that there are in fact, space aliens. Omg, the horrors! Honestly, I’m more afraid of the out of control gun violence in everyday American society than space aliens touching down on Earth. Maybe we could learn from them. lol
@ MR
Maybe you should have posted this thread in the “Astronomy” sub-forum, as there’s a recent thread discussing UFO’s, with no drama. lol I guess if you post in the “On the Fringe” sub-forum, members automatically associate “fringe” with “woo.”
Maybe next time.
Maybe you should have posted this thread in the “Astronomy” sub-forum, as there’s a recent thread discussing UFO’s, with no drama. lol I guess if you post in the “On the Fringe” sub-forum, members automatically associate “fringe” with “woo.”
Maybe next time.
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Yazata
Valued Senior Member
It is a good question and it seems to get to the heart of the disagreement in this thread.
"Extraordinary" seems to have a variety of meaning in this thread. I prefer reading it as 'unusual' as in 'extra-ordinary'. But it the way Sagan used it in this context, it seems to mean something that somehow contradicts one's belief about what exists or how the universe behaves. That individual's 'worldview' in other words.
So there's inevitably going to be a subjective element to it. It isn't so much about contradicting reality, as it is about contradicting beliefs about reality.
I think that we might be seeing a similar thing happening in reverse with biological evolution by natural selection. Except there it's the creationists who play the "skeptical" role and the self-appointed champions of "science" who play the role of proponent of something that violates the "skeptics" worldview. It's relatively easy to cast skeptical doubts upon fossil evidence or biogeography or comparative anatomy or whatever it is, in much the same way that the "skeptics" in this thread try to deconstruct observation reports of UFOs/UAPs. There's always going to be questions of interpretation and possible sources of error when considering the biological evidence (or any evidence). So they try to portray the evidence as a "comedy of errors".
In both cases, the bar will be set impossibly high, such that all possible sources of error or misinterpretation must somehow be excluded before the evidence becomes persuasive. Which is unlikely to ever happen, human beings being the fallible creatures that they are.
I will say that I don't see the two situations as fully symmetrical. I'm convinced that the evidence for biological evolution is reasonably strong and persuasive, no matter how many skeptical doubts the creationists throw at it. And I don't think that the UAP/UFO evidence is nearly as strong as that. But I do suspect that the same sort of cognitive worldview-defense biases are at work in both cases.
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DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
I can go out and gather my own fossils and develop my own theories, or disprove another's, with my own fresh data.
That cannot be done with UAPs.
You continue to ignore this critical aspect of analysis.
Persuasive of what?
What exactly is it that you feel skeptics are denying?
You have no theory. "It's a mystery" is not a theory.
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I'm a skeptic, but I believe UFO evidence exists, by which I mean evidence in the form of non-scientific observations of phenomenon that remain unexplained. The notion that these represent aliens is an explanation, but the most unlikely one available. There is a principle in science, which, although not proven to work all the time, is usually followed in these cases, which is that the most likely most mundane explanations are preferred to the least likely, most extraordinary explanations, Occam's Razor. The reason aliens are an unsatisfactory explanation is the vast distances between the stars, assuming they came from another solar system. Also the lack of evidence of any alien life anywhere so far observed. In addition, the strong desire for aliens to exist, and the presence of aliens in popular culture are good reasons to be even more skeptical of this explanation. So, it involves not only aliens, but aliens with faster than light drives, teleportation, generational ships, or some other unknown form of transport, with a motivation to come here, with a desire to remain hidden, and yet with an inability to remain hidden all the time.
There is the additional fact of foreign surveillance craft which are known to exist, floating in and out of the jet stream, which also moves fast. This is all complicated by our own level of technology, which we know is imperfect. And human observational abilities, which we know are easily fooled.
There is the additional fact of foreign surveillance craft which are known to exist, floating in and out of the jet stream, which also moves fast. This is all complicated by our own level of technology, which we know is imperfect. And human observational abilities, which we know are easily fooled.
Indeed. As I outlined for you, there are just so many ifs and maybes in the guesstimates of speeds and the like that we should take all such reports with a large grain of salt.
What you mean is that you prefer dubious speculations that tend to support what you already want to believe.
I'm going on what they reported.
I have dismissed nothing. I have merely questioned the reliability of certain guesstimates - an eminently sensible and prudent thing to do whenever extraordinary claims are made.
Either you just decided to ignore what I told you - as you so often do - or you didn't understand it. Or you're trolling again.
Look at what you've become.
Agreed.
But assertions made without evidence can be safely dismissed without evidence, too.
The burden of proof to prove that UFOs are alien spaceships, or time travellers from future Earth or ancient aquatic species from the primordial depths of the oceans, rests firmly on those who make those claims. It is not up to skeptics to "prove them wrong".
And there we have it once again, folks. Yazata's Big Lie.
Why do you feel the need to continually retell your Big Lie, Yazata?
As I have written previously, all these discussions of Bayesian estimates of prior probabilities and the like are all well and good, as far as they go. But they don't go very far at all. You end up just arguing over what you personally think the "priors" ought to be.
What you need, if you want to put the "UFOs are aliens" line, is convincing evidence. If you had that, then you wouldn't need to spend so much time guessing at what the a priori probability of aliens is. You could, instead, just point to the fantastic evidence you have gathered and say "With this, it's obviously an open and shut case. Take that, skeptics!"
All speculation, until such time as these recordings - if they exist - are publically released.
What we know here and now is that there are only verbal assertions of observations of unusual manouvrability and the like, along with the few released FLIR videos, for which we can't rule out mundane objects like jet aircraft, birds, whales etc.
Yes.
In fact, there's a long background of reports of equipment malfunctioning, the observation of spurious radar traces, reports of teething errors surrounding the introduction of new systems, etc., in the lead-up to the Fravor incident.
That seems like a reasonable guess. But it's a guess. We, here, only have the information that the military/government has chosen to make public. We have to work with that.
Eyewitness guesses about speeds of unknown things in the sky are speculative. Why do you privilege these speculations over ones made following more sober analysis, after the fact?
Humans are great at looking for and finding patterns, to the extent where we often "find" patterns that aren't "really" there, in the sense that the things that look like a pattern are causally linked.
The "puzzling" data that is cherry-picked from all the other data surrounding a UFO sighting is often selected precisely because it appears especially puzzling. In the process, important "mundane" data can be ignored.
But from any disparate collection of data, it is possible invent narratives that may or may not be true - connections that may or may not be real.
You complain that skeptical narratives to explain data are "just dismissive speculations". For some reason, you apparently regard eyewitness speculations, or UFO-believer speculations as something more than just speculations. I don't know why you do not equally dismiss the unproven speculations of UFO believers. You seem to have a double standard.
You don't know how good or bad the radars are. That's just your speculation, to suit your preferred narrative. What you really ought to do is to investigate and find out just how good or bad the radars really are. But I don't think you will.
I'm not even sure that there's any evidence that the radar detections and visual detections were coincident in time and place, which would be the bare minimum requirement for claiming that they "confirm" one another. Are you?
How did you decide this is unlikely, exactly?
Fravor was primed to see something unusual, long before he reported actually seeing anything.
What does his senior status as a pilot have to do with this?
How? The video doesn't show something that is clearly identifiable as anything.
You mean, because three unidentifiable things were seen, you think that all three must have been the same thing? Why?
Or three "somethings". Or maybe two somethings and a radar glitch.
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Stop trolling.
Nobody has said they "don't believe in UAPs", and you know this.
A UAP is an unidentified thing seen in the sky. A UAP could be the planet Venus, or a weather balloon, or a bank of fog around the Sun, or an alien spaceship from Mars. We don't know which is is, until the thing stops being "unidentified".
What is not believed are your claims that particular UAPs represent the technological super-"craft" which are "piloted" by lizard men who live at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. These claims of your are not believed because neither you, nor anybody else, has provided sufficient quality or quantity of evidence to justify acceptance of your claims.
This is not circular.
And stop lying about "they claim there is no evidence..." (The reason you give here is both stupid and irrelevant.)
The skeptics here have all examined the available evidence. We do not claim that evidence does not exist. The dispute is over what the data is evidence of.
You have comprehensively failed to convince the skeptics that the available data is evidence of anything "non-mundane". This is not a failure of imagination on the part of the skeptics; it is entirely your failure to dig up any convincing evidence.