UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

Q-reeus:

I watched the entire video you linked. There were a few interesting pieces of information in there that I wasn't previously aware of. Also a lot of skeptical suggestions that were not addressed.

Yes. The excuse offered on the high-res phone camera point was that (a) all UFOs are far away from the cameras and (b) the high res cameras are lousy in low light. At the same time, the maker of the video discusses UFOs the size of houses or football stadiums flying over people's houses, which supposedly thousands of people witnessed. And yet, the maker provides no footage of all of those UFOs, not even poor-quality footage.

The excuse made for anecdotal evidence was essentially that thousands of people can't be wrong. But they can.

The video spends a lot of time examining the gimbal footage. It doesn't really succeed in dismissing the skeptic analyses of that footage. The maker of the video makes a few new arguments (new to me, anyway), but doesn't appear to have considered some obvious explanations that would tend to refute the points he raises.

The Yankee stadium excuse is that skeptics set the bar so high that they would automatically assume that any footage of a landing at Yankee stadium would be dismissed as a fake, no matter how real-looking, despite many thousands of witness and lots of independent footage (including, I would assume, lots of high-res, quality phone footage at taken close range by many independent witnesses). This is implausible.

It's all the same evidence that we've already discussed earlier in this thread. The fanciful "recreation" footage isn't actual footage taken at the time. The eyewitnesses are the same ones we have previously discussed.

I don't think he does that. However, it is worth pointing out that, unlike Magical Realist, he does consider the possibility that UFOs are human-made craft. If that was true, they obviously wouldn't satisfy MR's definition of a UFO as something that has performance characteristics that cannot be attained by human aircraft.

 

Not one mention was made of "craft" either.

 

How many times has MR settled on "pilots" of "craft" that display characeristics beyond anything human beings can do?

Answer: almost every time he posts.

 

Of course, it doesn't totally demolish it at all. This is just the typical sort of empty claim that MR makes habitually. I'm sure that it will get a "like" from Q-reeus - probably from dmoe too, since giving likes to his friends - no matter what they post - is practically his only contribution here these days.

 

The maker of Q-reeus's video disagrees with you. He explicitly says they could be "us". I guess you'll be tracking him down to set him straight on that point. (?)

 

Q-reeus:

You know there is a whole subforum dedicated to UFOs, Ghosts and Monsters?

You don't have to ride on the Magical Realist bandwagon and only post in his thread. If you have something more credible to offer, you could start your own thread rather than continuing to post in this trainwreck of a thread.

Again, there's no need for you to ally yourself with the court jester. Sure, Magical Realist has made a fool of himself, but you still have some credibility left. I'd suggest that you don't waste it by throwing your lot in with Magical Realist and his blind faith.

 

Yazata,

My post to you was aimed squarely at what you wrote. I even quoted you. In your post, you referred to MR and to river, so I also referred to them. I also used both of them as examples to show where the thinking (if that's what you want to call it) of the True Believers goes wrong.

I've said it to MR before, so now I'll say it to you. When I write "aliens" in the context of UFOs - in the current thread at least - you can take it that I include all of MR's suggestions about extradimensional beings, human time travellers from the future, spirits from another dimension - the lot of them. If you want to complain that I'm fixated on extraterrestrial intelligences then you're missing the point in the same way that MR consistently does.

The fact is, if you assume from the start, as MR does, that anything you see in the sky must have a non-mundane origin then you're making an unwarranted assumption right from the word go.

After everything I've written about this, do you seriously think for one moment that I've closed off the possibility that some of them might be something truly new?

Never mind that the more stable UFO believers admit that 95%+ of UFO sightings turn out to have mundane explanations, leaving only a few "difficult" cases that remain unsolved. Never mind that in the 70 years that flying saucers have been a fad, nobody has managed to produce really convincing evidence that there's anything "new" in the skies.

The point is this: if you want to assert that a given UFO is something truly new, then you have to have established in advance of making that claim that your UFO sighting is, with high confidence, not something "old" - i.e. not something mundane or explainable in light of what we already know about our world.

Sure, anything is possible. But you're not justified in making the positive claim that there's something "new" until you have ruled out conventional explanations. And here's the thing: even in the best UFO cases, like the "tic tac" thing we've been discussing, conventional explanations have very much not been ruled out.

I'm exaggerating, of course, but not very much. Have you actually read MR's posts on the topic?

When I argue against MR, I'm arguing against the believer in alien spaceships (/time travellers/extradimensional fairies/etc.).

My beef with you here is you are apparently ready to accept MR's lie (also the lie of many similar True Believers) that skeptics like myself make an a priori assumption that all UFOs can be explained with reference to conventional explanations. I make no such assumption. I never have. All I say is what I said at the start of my previous reply to you: if you think a UFO is something "new", the onus is on you to show that it is "new" (i.e. unexplainable in conventional terms).

Showing that a UFO is something "new" is not simply a matter of saying "we can't tell what this thing is, so there's a mystery here". We both agree there is mystery, from the start. That is why we need to investigate UFO cases in the first place. That's why they are UFOs - they are unidentified (at this time).

If, after extensive investigation, we can't pin down what a particular UFO is, then the correct conclusion is not "It was an extraterrestrial craft" or "It was interdimensional fairies". The correct conclusion is "We haven't solved the mystery at this time."

There can be all kinds of reasons why UFO cases remain unsolved. Only one of those reasons is that we might be dealing with something "new". Much more commonly, the reason it is unsolved is because there isn't enough evidence, or the necessary evidence we'd need to solve the mystery is no longer available, or the evidence is of questionable quality and/or provenance. It is simply shoddy thinking to assume that any case that suffers from these evidential problems must point to something "new" by default.

You think I'm one of those internet bullies you're referring to? I'm going too hard on poor fragile Magical Realist and his faith-based beliefs?

I completely understand that you might feel that MR is entitled to believe whatever crap he wants to believe in, and therefore I have no right to challenge his beliefs. I agree with you that he is free to believe whatever he likes. However, he doesn't stop there. He makes strident claims that his beliefs are objectively verifiable with reference to evidence, and that's utterly wrong. Moreover, he is dishonest in all discussions about his claims. He selectively ignores all evidence that tends to refute his claims. He refuses to consider reasonable explanations that tend to undermine his claims. He refuses even to acknowledge the realities about the kind of evidence he most commonly presents - anecdote, unrealiable eyewitness testimony, fuzzy videos and photos of unverifiable origin, etc. etc. You've seen how he conducts himself in these discussions. Why would you defend him? He's a troll.

Maybe you think that MR is intellectually limited, so that its a bullying act for me to ask him to think critically, or to analyse anything he presents as evidence. I don't think that. What I find most frustrating about MR is that he has the capacity to think but actively chooses not to do so. The underlying psychology of that fascinates me, however. It's really the most interesting thing about MR, and I have yet to get to the bottom of it. I wonder what the real reasons are for why he believes in all the woo he believes in: the ghosts and the monsters and the conspiracy theories and the UFOs and the rest of it.

Then open your eyes. Look at how MR conducts himself in these discussions. He's a troll.