Say what you want be we are screwed!!!

[Brazoo]

I feel like in some of this I'm going to just be repeating myself a bit, and I don't want to be to bore you too much, so I'm going to try to stick to new points where I can!

I could just as easily point out that all of the major sightings that have been reported by respected scientists, military personnel, ex-government personnel, ex- NASA exployees, airline pilots, astronauts, law enforcement, etc, are predictably discredited, dismissed as "mistaken"... or even more insultingly, labeled as "crazy".

People are people. We're ALL susceptible to being mistaken. I'm not dismissing all these cases - but this is why "argument from authority" is a logical fallacy.

Also, I'm not calling anyone crazy. Though I assume there ARE crazy people who have seen "aliens".

But believers have understandably become very cynical of "official explanations" that stretch credibilty beyond the breaking point. I'm not talking about idiot hoaxers here. But people become very insulted when they are told that what they saw and experienced was NOT what it was... or worse when they are called liars.

Yeah, but feelings are exactly what entrenches people into beliefs beyond what the evidence shows. My interest is in truth - better found with objectivity, no?

I know you believe that scientists are entrenched in their belief systems and tossing out evidence, and I've stated this before, but that's not how the consensus of science works. Newtonian mechanics were tossed in the garbage can just as the theory of relativity was demonstrated with evidence. There are SO many examples of this through the history of science. YES individual scientists may be susceptible to ignoring data because of personal bais - but there are very few examples of the consensus remaining on the wrong course after proper evidence is presented. Just like the jurors we were talking about before.

Sober, decent people (with NOTHING to gain by their claims except ridicule) KNOW what they saw and experienced... whether they are mistaken or not. But the "official explanations" crammed down their throats are often (frankly) insulting to their intelligence. Don't tell people that the strange craft they saw in the night sky was "swamp gas" when:

A) The sighting took place nowhere near a swamp.
B) The craft was witnessed by multitudes of people who all have IDENTICAL accounts of what they saw.

and

C) The vessel is witnessed performing areal acrobatics which are IMPOSSIBLE for even the most advanced aircraft devised by man to perform.. much less mere swamp gas.

Actually, if you listen to good skeptics - like Dr. Steven Novella, The Amazing Randi, Michael Shermer or Carl Sagan they're usually not denying that in situations where multiple people have witnessed something unusual that they haven't. The conclusion that the unusual thing is "Alien" is what they (and I) contest. And they're usually not mocking people - thought they may at times mock the folly of human error that could effect THEM too. Their argument is FOR the scientific method to take precedence.

You're other examples don't have enough info for me to debate. But for example - a VERY common sighting is something along the lines of "Three lights in a perfect triangle formation so it couldn't be natural". A) the believer here is concluding that the answer needs to be natural or alien when there ARE other possibilities that they're ignoring B) any 3 lights in the sky form a triangle.

One of the things we're really bad at is sensing scale and distance without anything to judge scale against (like the night sky), and we're really not so hot at seeing at night anyway. How many times have you looked down and thought a sock left on the floor was a mouse (or something)? Maybe even thought it moved a little? but then turned on the lights and/or looked closer and realized what it was just a sock. Night vision really isn't our bag.

The "believers" are the ones "throwing out data"? Really??

Yes, I stand totally by that, actually. I can't say all. I think most are just not understanding some of the primary principals of science and doing it unwillingly - to be honest. The lack of falsification that goes on in the (as you say) "believer" side, is really lacking in the research that's usually done, for starters. Then there's the logical fallacies like "Confusing currently unexplained with unexplainable", "Confusing association with causation", "Ad ignorantiam"...

Listen, if you spend more than 50 years telling people that what crashed on that rancher's farmland in Roswell, New Mexico back in 1947 was a crashed weather balloon, but military personnel were the ones who were charged with the Top Secret clean-up, then you have to expect that people are going to speculate and ask questions.

If I believe the military covered "something" up, why do I have to assume it was alien? Why not a secret military craft? Again, your explanation is adding WAY too many unknowns - and that's my main problem.

Bottom line, the military DOES do secret stuff.

Weather balloons... the standard cop-out explanation for all sorts of bizarre witnessed areal phenomena for decades.

Many years (and many de-bunkings) after the government's BS story about a "weather balloon" at Roswell New Mexico, they "admitted" that what actually crashed on that ranch was a high altitude surveillance balloon from a classified project named "Mogul". Right. You gotta wonder what new story they'll come up with 30 years from now (if the truth is still not revealed).

When a strange object appeared over the skies of the California coast on February 25th 1942, the US Army fired anti-aircraft batteries up at it for over an hour. They could not bring down the object. Within 24 hours, the Department of War sent a memo to the President classifying the incident as being precipitated by "unidentified airplanes". But the Army declared the object was a "weather balloon".

I'm not necessarily saying that what appeared in the night skies over Los Angeles was an extraterrestrial flying saucer. But find it a little worrisome that over 1500 rounds of anti-aircraft shrapnel were incapable of bringing down... a "weather balloon".

Don't you at least find that odd?.

I might find that odd - but not 3 months after Peal Harbor. Not the day after Santa Barbara California was attacked by a Japanese sub. L.A. was in constant surveillance mode. Nerves were high - EVERYONE on the coast was expecting and dreading another attack. Images of cities bombed in Europe were in every paper every day - and had been for years at that point.

We know first hand what people's nerves were like after 9/11, and how citizens were constantly kept on their toes to look out for anything odd. There were incidences all over the US, Canada and Europe where full out bomb squads and evacuations were initiated only to find something dumb and harmless.

Covering up a alien ship and covering up a mistake look exactly the same - but personally, I live in a world where people making mistakes is a more common phenomena than alien ships.

[Brazoo]

Darklord - my feeling is that it's hard for you to understand how I can dismiss some of the cases you're siting, so I'll try to explain in a summary.

• When you follow the scientific method
• when you adhere your understanding of the world to what is knowable and don't base your ideas on unknowable "beliefs"
• when you understand that you can't "prove a negative"
• when you use tools for rationalization (like falsification, or Occam's Razor)
• when you understand illusion and phenomena like Pareidolia
• when you study how much research has confirmed the fallibility of our memories and senses
• when you toss out arguments based on logical fallacies

there isn't much left to discuss about alien/UFO theories. The cases you sited are full of these problems.

I also want to point out some of the better analysis I have come across for some of the events or claims you are siting, because some of the claims you are siting are decades old, and there has be progress made to uncover these claims that have produced very little - or in fact brought to light some of the inconsistencies of these claims and bring into question the information that these arguments are based on:

Kevin D. Randle is a longtime UFOlogist and "believer". In a 2011 interview in "Skeptical Inquirer" he admits, "I set a very high bar for the level of evidence required. There are very few authentic UFO cases. However, some skeptical explanations don't fit the facts. Still, I'm getting more skeptical in my old age." Simply put, when you want good evidence and you devote a lot of time to uncovering evidence to support your theory that doesn't materialize you have to start questioning your theory.

Here's a recent (well, recent for Roswell research) blog entry Randle wrote regarding the consistency of Major Jesse Marcel's information and he even points out some of the ways errors could have entered into the official story and loosely suggests that Marcel's memory was suspect on other issues as well: A Different Perspective: Major Jesse Marcel, Sr.

He didn't just listen to youtube videos edited to show one perspective, this is Randle hunting down original source material (very very important) for the claims and coming up with information that questions the available data instead of confirming it.


The same connection to facts and, let's just call them "issues" with Gordon Cooper's story exists. Some of his facts or memories are just wrong. There are others, but here's one example based on his claim that the photos he saw never resurfaced:

"Now, in fact those photographs did not vanish after all: they had been sent to Project Blue Book, at Wright- Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio, per regulations (I even have talked to the officer who did the original Blue Book interviews, former Captain Hubert Davis, who had been greatly impressed with the witness's sincerity) . Years later the photos were pulled out of the retired Air Force files by UFO writers and investigators, as yet ignorant of the still-unpublished "Cooper connection". Two of the photos appear in Brad Steiger's paperback "Project Blue Book" (Ballantine, 1976) in the set of illustrations between pages 360 and 361."

UFO Evidence: In Search of Gordon Cooper's UFOs (skeptical)

I'm not saying this answers why he's seeing UFOs (which he claims to somehow know are alien) but you should also take a look at the effects of concussions, a history of understanding the long lasting effects of concussion. Test pilots and astronauts have prolonged and regular exposure to G-forces that produce them - and I'm saying again that this doesn't answer what's happening, but we can't just wipe that off the board either.

This was a really great science podcast (unrelated to UFOs entirely) where they discuss G-force effects with interviews of pilots who experienced them: http://www.radiolab.org/2006/may/05/out-of-body-roger/

I'm not dismissing what HE experienced, but I am saying there are ways to experience what he experienced without actually being correct.

There are TONS of memory experiments and studies that conclude that older memories are less accurate and that the accuracy of those memories can actually decrease as the level of confidence increases. Here's one study:

http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftu...es/Imagine.htm

[ctc]

>In science a good theory is usually falsifiable.

Actually; in science a theory is ALWAYS falsifiable. That’s what makes it science and not faith. Lots of folks don’t understand that one, which is why you hear a lot of “Yeah? Well... last year they said we should do THIS and now they say THAT! ‘Cos they don’t know anything!” Science changes as our knowledge increases. It’s DESIGNED that way.

The problem with a lot of.... let’s call them conspiracy theories ‘cos I can’t think of a more apt term and I’m sure this one puts us all on the same page.... is that they AREN’T falsifiable. No matter what evidence you can provide to disprove them, there’s always another layer that can be slapped on. It’s called “ad hoc;” and it’s the opposite of good ol’ Occam’s Razor. So if you’re of a mind that the government is covering up aliens there’s really NO way to dissuade this, ‘cos the lack of evidence becomes PART of the evidence. “Well, if there IS a huge conspiracy to hide the flying saucers, why haven’t we seen more hard data?” ‘Cos they’re THAT GOOD at it, that’s why! Not only is that ad hoc, it’s circular too; and circular arguments tend to feed off themselves. Add in some ignorance and yer off to the races!

>One of the things we're really bad at is sensing scale and distance without anything to judge scale against

If that wasn’t the case, video games and comic books wouldn’t work. Eyewitness testimony is considered the absolute worst in court, because it’s so easy for witnesses to be wrong. Not ‘cos we’re stupid or anything, but because there are so many problems with our senses and how our brains process stuff.

Don C.

[Brazoo]

Awesome - thanks for clarity Don!


RE: Face On Mars and NASA Photographic Anomalies

Richard C. Hoagland's "Face on Mars" theories are just not convincing to me in the least. I think anyone who comes from an artistic background is going to be very skeptical of these claims because we know that it doesn't take much to see realistic objects in abstract forms. The psychological effect is called Pareidolia. With all due respect to you personally, this stuff is decades old and has gained no ground or evidence in science study in any relevant discipline - even ones outside of space related research - like archeology for example. No evidence can change Hoagland's theories, because he dismisses all new evidence as part of a conspiracy. Well, that's just not how science works. As Don just stated, a theory needs to be able to change with new evidence.

Those videos of the NASA airbrushing structures on the moon couldn't be less compelling to me. Show me pictures from different angles confirming those "structures" are consistently occupying the space they're suppose to be in before they even become compelling enough to research them. Also - try taking a picture you own and scan it - then zoom all the way in. You'll see all kinds of fuzzy details. Those "structures" are minuscule and a photo is a 2D surface. For argument's sake let's say that NASA is airbrushing the pictures. All sorts of dust particles and moisture can get onto a lens, and it's perfectly reasonable that NASA would airbrush flaws in the images like that. Anyone who works professionally with photos needs to do this all the time. I do this all the time!

PLUS - Hoagland and others have been jumping up and down about NASA conspiracies for years. What about Russia's moon missions? What about China's moon missions? What about the ESA, JAXA and all the other world space agencies? They're all just in on it? Honestly, this stuff your siting is very old - it's a whole different world now. NASA is just one player now - so you can't really keep using that logic. Unless you keep adopting and expanding your paradigm to explain away the new data.

[Brazoo]

Darklord, in this link you posted:

Cydonia 101: Page 7

Honestly, this one is just full of logical fallacies like "Circular cause and consequence", "sharpshooter fallacy", "Cherry Picking" and "Kettle logic".

Look up the history of these geometric shapes in other non-Mars alien sources. Like a geometry book. These shapes occur in nature and were studied and emulated so that people could build stuff that would - you know, not fall down because they stand up in nature!

So - for example: If a giant mound of dirt is to support its own weight it tends to be mountain shaped - a pyramid shaped mound of dirt is even stronger (I've said this in another discussion we had a while ago, but it's worth repeating I think: a pyramid isn't the most complex structure to build on a large scale, it's actually the most primitive.)

"Golden ratio", "Fibonacci Spiral" and Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man" geometrically describe shapes that happen naturally. The site almost basically understands this - for example on the site I found these statements: "You can then use these shapes, to create the Golden Spiral, which also manifests in the geometry of nature." and "This Golden Ratio is also expressed in the formations of nature. "

They seem to be arguing (in a very convoluted way), that these structures HAVE to be designed by intelligent beings - because they based on geometry found in nature.(?!!!) Those are two totally contrary ideas build on a hodgepodge of mathematical gobbledygook. We should throw the "wrong direction" logical fallacy on this too - since the nature came first and geometry to describe it came after - but they're arguing natural structures can't have this geometry. It's very odd.