UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

Discussion in 'UFOs, Ghosts and Monsters' started by Magical Realist, Oct 10, 2017.

  1. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Just another ignorant skeptic pontificating about what he never looks into. Don't waste my time.
     
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  3. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    How many years of "Atlantis Rising" to I have on my computer? (It may be hard for you to type with your tail tucked between your legs.)
     
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  5. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    LOL! Wow..that's really impressive. I bow before your vast new age knowledge.
     
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  7. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    If you're trying to be snarky you haven't got the mojo for it. You just come of sounding whiny.
     
  8. river

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    More importantly you come off as being ignorant .
     
  9. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    You're right, I've never met a space alien, so I'm ignorant of their most basic characteristics. Happily, that makes me just like everybody else.
     
  10. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    If context is everything, I guess that's why our moderators snipped what is now post #1 out of its context in a different thread and made it the stand-alone beginning of this one.

    How does your longer excerpt contradict or undercut the shorter quote [highlighted by me] that MR posted in what is now post #1 in this thread?

    Except that the debunkers rarely actually demonstrate that what was reported was actually a helicopter at a distance. They just speculate that it might have been, then leap to the conclusion that it has somehow been proven that it was.

    That's not tremendously different than what the ufo believers seemingly do. Both sides are engaging in non-sequiturs and leaping to poorly justified conclusions. So it seems to me that what we are seeing is expressions of faith from both sides.

    And that might indeed have been Jacques Vallee's point: If the whole argument devolves into competing expressions of faith, then it shouldn't be surprising to see ufo belief starting to look like a faith-based system.

    The sad thing is that despite all their "scientific" posturing, the self-styled "skeptics" (nothing could be further from the truth) start to look like a faith-based system too. The "skeptical" organizations like CSICOP really do start to look like scientistic cults. They already know all the answers (by faith) and the only thing that remains to be done is to attack anyone who disagrees.
     
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  11. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    I suggest you go out and buy a copy of "Skeptic" magazine or "Skeptical Enquirer" and have a read. What you'll find - not universally, but overwhelmingly - is a careful examination of claims and a critical eye on the evidence. In the best examples, skeptics do on-the-spot investigations of supposed ghost sightings and alien encounters. Much more important is the work that skeptics do debunking spurious health-care claims and other scams to get people's money, because those are much more likely to have negative consequences for people who are sucked in.

    Among skeptics there are some cheerleaders, but I wager you'll find a much higher proportion of those among the ranks of the true believers in the paranormal. Those people aren't out there investigating anything.
     
  12. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Let's see, helicopter or alien space ship. Anybody want to place bets?
     
  13. Janus58 Valued Senior Member

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    This is one of the things that gets me about the "true believers", they rabidly defend every case, even the obviously false ones. Whenever a fake psychic is exposed, they rush to his defense. I mean, even if psychic ability was real there would be people out there faking it. You would think that the proponents of psychic powers would be happy that someone was clearing out the chaff for them so that they could focus on the wheat, but they never are.
     
  14. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    I understand you can get a UFO/cryptid app for cell phone cameras now. It blurs the pictures.
     
  15. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I remember thinking at one time about asking you whether those magazines are available in Australia.

    I've long liked Skeptic (the one from Pasadena) better than Skeptical Inquirer (the CSICOP one). The former once seemed to me to be more open-minded and less doctrinaire. But they've both been pretty bad recently.

    The general tendency seems to be to leap on claims that they consider bullshit and then to try to present arguments that discredit those claims. The belief that the claims are bullshit seems to typically be a-priori, in other words it seems to exist prior to whatever "careful examination" that may or may not subsequently take place. (Examination that almost always seems to confirm the initial belief they started with.)

    I agree with you about the latter.

    That depends on whether we are talking about the kind people who conduct 'investigations' (however lame they might be), or the kind of people who post to internet discussion boards. I'd wager that very few of the "skeptics" who post on Sciforums have ever personally investigated anything, beyond reading a few of the "skeptical" magazines. Yet they express loud, dismissive and often abusive opinions with absolute faith-based assurance.

    If we want to compare the "skeptical" investigators with somebody, that should be with their opposite numbers, with UFO investigators, (such as they are).

    For example, the French government's GEIPAN (a branch of the French space agency CNES). This one investigates French UFO reports. If I'm reading the French right, they say that 19% of their reports have been conclusively identified to their satisfaction, 38% have probably (but not certainly) been identified, 34% aren't identifiable (due to defective quality of the reports, I guess), and 9% resist identification.

    http://www.cnes-geipan.fr/

    My own view is that about all that we can say about that 9% is that we don't currently know what they were and probably shouldn't jump to conclusions. Personally, I'd speculate that most of them were probably something relatively mundane, but I can't rule out the possibility that some hitherto unknown phenomenon is making an appearance in some of them

    I try to keep my mind open to that possibility.

    MUFON has been active here in the US for a long time and they try to conduct investigations.

    CUFOS was founded by J. Allen Haynek and it has NICAP's records.

    There a at least a dozen other active UFO investigations groups in various countries. So I'm not convinced that I'd agree that it's the "skeptics" who are doing most of the investigating.
     
    Last edited: Oct 22, 2017
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  16. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    A recent head of MUFON quit in disgust because in the years he'd been head of the organization not one piece of valid evidence had crossed his desk.
     
  17. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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  18. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Name?
     
  19. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    IOW, you know what it is without even investigating it. Typical skeptic horseshit.
     
  20. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Simply not true. MUFON for example investigates many cases every year of which many are debunked as naturally caused or mistaken aircraft.
     
  21. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Let's see, how important was it to remember his name...
     
  22. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Might be important to prove you're not repeating a lie..
     
  23. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    And you investigate mundane objects because you WANT them to be little green space buddies. Typical gullible horseshit.
     

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